Market data is information about current stock prices, recent trades, and supply-and-demand levels sold by national securities exchanges. Access to this information is essential to America’s world-leading capital markets.

Retail investors and market professionals need the most complete and up-to-date market information possible to make informed investing and order routing decisions. Because exchanges control that information, they have enormous pricing power over the cost to access the data.

Market data reform should focus on promoting competition, supporting efficient markets, and providing a transparent and fair system for all investors. SIFMA has long argued that exchange market data fee increases are inconsistent with the exchanges’ actual costs in collecting and distributing market data and thus constitute an excessive mark-up over costs.

In August 2021, the SEC approved a new single national market system plan governing the public dissemination of real-time consolidated equity market data for national market system (NMS) stocks. Known as the CT Plan, this new plan consolidates the three current market data plans into a single plan to govern the distribution of equity market data, reducing duplication between the plans, and eliminating exchanges’ conflicts of interest as operators of the SIPs by making other structural changes to the distribution of market data.

In addition, the SEC in December 2020 adopted rules to modernize the infrastructure for the collection, consolidation, and dissemination of market data for NMS stocks. Modernization of this infrastructure has been a SIFMA priority for many years as it has not been significantly updated since its initial implementation in the late 1970s. The Market Data Infrastructure rule significantly expands the content of NMS market data to better meet the needs of retail and institutional investors in today’s equity markets.