[TheNanex]

Where to begin.

The retail investor gets the slowed down price (the NBBO is really what the internalizer/wholesaler saw from the SIP when they executed your order). That same internalizer buys/sells from the faster feed. Whenever the two feeds are out of sync, it's like printing money.

"The price for getting a direct line is not unreasonable?" I just laughed out loud reading that. Is $60,000/month for just one exchange (there are a dozen), reasonable? Then you need network engineers, infrastructure, etc. It used to be nowhere near this expensive for "real-time" data. Orders of magnitude less.

[kasey_junk]

What would be your proposal for a solution to a sync'd feeds obvious distributed systems problems?

How much latency would be acceptable for a fully consistent, high throughput distributed log of events, that when it becomes unavailable the entirety of US trading shuts down and if it ever gets out of order can cause gigantic lawsuits?

How would you change the obvious organizational disincentives as well? Given that maintenance of the SIP is full cost, no profit operation for the exchanges?

Finally, don't take this as a criticism of your whistle blowing, I think that is critical to a functioning market, I am curious to know how you would solve the obvious technical challenges the consolidated feed faces?

[nanexllc]

You are making straw man arguments. While I'm happy to discuss what the SIP should be in an ideal world, the topic at hand is what is current law. For those that don't know, it's Reg NMS (google it).

[KMag]

What do you mean by "fully consistent" in the context of the SIP feed? The SIP isn't required to be consistent in the CAP sense of "consistent".