Market Data Feeds, Explained — And Why Yours Is Overpriced.

Ask a new firm founder to list their launch costs and they will name the CRM, the platform, the payment processors, the marketing. The line they almost always forget — until the invoice arrives — is market data. Every price on every chart, every quote on every order ticket, every tick your risk engine evaluates originates in a data feed, and in the traditional stack that feed is its own vendor, its own negotiation and its own permanent monthly bill.

This article explains what a market data feed actually is, why the contracts cost what they cost, and why the most interesting recent development in this corner of the industry is that with eTrader, the feed stopped being a line item at all.

What a Data Feed Actually Is

A market data feed is a continuous stream of price updates — bids, asks and last prices — for the instruments a platform offers. For a multi-asset book that means forex pairs, metals like XAUUSD, indices, and crypto, each streaming ticks that the platform turns into candles, quotes and P&L calculations. Three properties determine a feed's quality:

• Freshness — how often prices update. eTrader's feed updates every 70 milliseconds, fast enough that charts are effectively live to the human eye.
• Coverage — which instruments are included, so your product catalogue is not constrained by your data contract.
• Cleanliness — whether spikes, gaps and bad ticks are handled before they reach charts and risk engines. A single wild tick can wrongly trigger stops or, for a prop firm, wrongly breach an account — which is why feed quality is a risk-management issue, not just a cosmetic one.

The Traditional Cost Stack

Why does something as basic as prices cost real money every month? Because the traditional supply chain has several hands in it. Prices originate with liquidity providers and venues; aggregators consolidate and clean them; distributors license the result — and each layer adds margin and terms. By the time a startup broker or prop firm signs, the arrangement typically involves a recurring monthly fee, sometimes per-instrument-group pricing, redistribution clauses governing what you may display where, and a contract to negotiate, renew and lawyer. None of this is malicious — real infrastructure sits underneath — but the structure was built for an era when only substantial institutions consumed live data. For a lean firm, it produces a familiar absurdity: paying a standing monthly fee, forever, for the raw material every competitor also has.

The Hidden Costs Beyond the Invoice

The subscription is only the visible part. Sourcing a feed means weeks of vendor evaluation before launch — exactly the phase where speed matters most. Integration means wiring the feed into your platform and keeping the connection healthy, which implies technical staff. And the contract itself becomes a dependency: a renegotiation, price rise or termination threatens your entire product, because a trading platform with no prices is a screensaver. Add it up and the true cost of "just the data" is procurement time, integration effort, an ops burden and a standing vendor risk — before the monthly fee.

The Alternative: A Feed That Ships with the Platform

eTrader takes the position that live market data is not a product to sell you — it is a precondition of the product working. A 70ms-updated data feed is included with the platform, free to use: no separate contract to source, no monthly data bill, no redistribution negotiation. Prices stream into the terminal, the charts and your connected portals from day one. Because the feed and platform come from one vendor, integration is not your problem, feed health is monitored as part of the managed service, and the latency story stays coherent end to end — a chain explored in why latency matters.

Crucially, included does not mean captive. Firms with their own liquidity relationships or preferred sources plug them in whenever they want, managed per instrument from the eTrader Broker dashboard. Run the included feed for most of the book and your own source where you have an edge — the choice stays yours, which is the subject of killing the separate data contract.

What This Does to Firm Economics

Consider the two stacks side by side. The traditional route: platform licence from one vendor, data contract from another, integration between them, and staff to keep it alive. The bundled route: eTrader from $6,600/month for brokers or $3,300/month for prop firms plus a one-time setup fee ($3,300 for brokers, $1,650 for prop firms) and a $1.50 per-account fee — feed included, hosting included, integration already done. For a prop firm, the difference is not only money but calendar: Singuard's Prop Firm CRM bundles ship with eTrader and its feed already wired to the rules engine, which is part of how a firm goes from kickoff to selling challenges in as little as 24 hours, and a broker on the Broker CRM in 24. There is no data-vendor evaluation phase because there is no data vendor to evaluate.

Questions to Ask Any Data Vendor — Or Platform Vendor

Whether you assemble or bundle, the diligence questions are the same: How often do prices update, and is that end-to-end or at the source? Which instruments are covered, and what does adding one cost? How are bad ticks and spikes handled before they hit charts and risk logic? What happens commercially if we terminate — does our platform go dark? And finally: what is the all-in monthly cost, data included? With eTrader the answers are short: 70ms, multi-asset across forex, metals, indices and crypto, handled by the managed platform, and the data line on your budget reads zero. See it streaming live at etraderweb.com.

"Data feeds cost too much because they were sold as scarcity. Update every 70 milliseconds, include it in the price, move on."

— Alex Onta, Executive Director, eTrader & Prop Firm CRM

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