BMLL Expands Coverage With Addition of US Equity Options Data
By Dominic Sow · 19 November 2024
BMLL, the leading, independent provider of harmonised, historical Level 3, 2 and 1 data and analytics across global equity, ETFs and futures markets, today announced the addition of OPRA (Options Price Reporting Authority) data to its ever-expanding data coverage. Six years of historical, nanosecond unconflated OPRA options data is now available to market participants globally, in addition to conflated datasets, complementing existing US equity and futures datasets.
Widely recognised as one of the industry's largest data sets, OPRA data is vital for traders, brokers, institutional investors, and market makers who need accurate and timely information to assess liquidity dynamics and understand market behaviour.
OPRA consolidates and distributes options data from all U.S. equity options exchanges, providing a unified feed of options prices and trade information; financial market participants rely on OPRA data to make informed trading decisions, manage risk, and optimise investment strategies.
- Buy-side firms use OPRA data to backtest strategies, perform TCA and execution analysis, and generate alpha.
- Sell-side firms rely on OPRA data to backtest execution algorithms, improve smart order routers and demonstrate best execution, track liquidity fragmentation and stay informed of changes to market structure.
- Using OPRA data, Exchanges can analyse market share across US equity options exchanges and mechanisms.
Paul Humphrey, Chief Executive Officer of BMLL, said: “Adding OPRA options data is another significant milestone in our data coverage expansion strategy. To date, we have built out our equities coverage to 98% of the MSCI All-Country World Index. Including OPRA options in our data and analytics capabilities is a natural evolution for BMLL, driven by customer demand for a best-in-class product and very much in line with our multi-asset strategy.
At BMLL, we are building products and services that make a real difference to market participants, helping them understand liquidity dynamics and make better-informed trading decisions. We take care of the heavy lifting to make sure that our customers get the market data they need, ready to use, in one harmonised format.“
The BMLL OPRA data product provides a cleansed, normalised tick history dataset, covering all OPRA historical data. BMLL’s six years of nanosecond unconflated OPRA options data is available to market participants globally via BMLL Data Lab and BMLL Data Feed, via AWS S3.
“Spiralling data costs and OPRA’s expansion of its data dissemination from 48 to 96 lines in February 2024 have placed a significant burden on market participants, both in terms of managing market data budgets and also the necessary data infrastructure [to handle 4TB of data per day]”, said David Robinson, Chief Technology Officer, BMLL. “As a result, firms are looking for cloud-based OPRA data services that are easy to access, within their existing workflows.”
Making OPRA data available via BMLL Data Lab and BMLL Data Feed, via AWS S3, is another step in our mission to democratise data and analytics at scale and meet our customers where they need us to be. They can now gain immediate access to this significant dataset in a cloud-based environment, at a level of conflation that suits their own specific needs, and at the highest quality available in the market today.
OPRA aggregates and disseminates pricing information for listed Options contracts in the U.S., including quotes, last sale prices, and volume data. OPRA participants include BOX, Cboe BZX Options, Cboe C2 Options, Cboe EDGX Options, Cboe Options Exchange, Miami International Securities Exchange, MIAX Emerald, MIAX PEARL, Nasdaq BX, Nasdaq GEMX, Nasdaq ISE, Nasdaq MRX, Nasdaq PHLX, The Nasdaq Stock Market, NYSE American and NYSE Arca. Companies in this story: BMLL
People in this story: Paul Humphrey, David Robinson