Market Data Fragmentation and the 24/5 Trading Era
What’s Actually Changed
Institutional trading isn’t expanding along one line anymore. New asset classes, new geographies, and 24/5 trading hours are all showing up at once. The result? Market data fragmentation that’s a lot harder to out-build than it used to be.
What’s Changed in the 2026 Market Data Fragmentation Landscape?
“Everything, everywhere, all at once” is a pretty literal description of where institutional trading stands this year.
Everything
Trading strategies now stretch beyond equities into tokenized assets, real-world assets, and event-driven markets. Each one comes with its own data environment and its own integration puzzle.
Everywhere
Liquidity is growing across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Asia-Pacific (APAC), and Latin America (LATAM). Abu Dhabi’s exchange posted a 159% surge in single-session transactions earlier this year. Every new region means new co-location, new hardware, new local support.
All at Once
24/5 trading isn’t an experiment anymore. Some overnight platforms have seen notional activity jump more than 200% in a year, and major exchanges are extending their own sessions to keep up.
Add it all up, and liquidity now lives across hundreds of exchanges, alternative trading systems, and dark pools. None of that is new on its own. What’s new is facing it all at once, and market data fragmentation is the real cost of growth happening on every front.
Why Doesn’t the Old Infrastructure Model Scale?
For years, building it yourself made sense in core markets, where the volume justified the investment. That math gets shakier once expansion means unfamiliar regulations, settlement cycles, and data formats.
The numbers back it up. Software feed handlers can cost about eight times more to build in-house than to buy, and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) builds land around five times higher, before maintenance even enters the picture. Deloitte pegs technical debt at 21%-40% of enterprise IT budgets industry-wide. That’s the real tax: maintaining every market already entered, long after the build is done.
Is the Consolidated Tape Wave Adding to the Pressure?
To navigate these expanding trading sessions, firms must adapt their infrastructure to handle 24/5 trading alongside a surge of global regulatory mandates. Regulators across multiple jurisdictions are moving simultaneously—the European consolidated tape (EuroCTP), the UK bond and derivatives tape, and Canada’s push toward a cross-venue best bid and offer are all arriving on tight timelines. While these initiatives enhance transparency, each presents a strict compliance deadline that engineering teams must build against.
At the same time, continuous 24/5 trading introduces significant market data complexity. Without a standardized overnight reference price, institutional trading desks are forced to stitch together their own version of a “best price” from disparate, real-time feeds—an operational challenge that compounds as market data fragmentation deepens.
Where Does the Hybrid Model Fit?
Most firms mix build and buy already. They want to own what makes their strategies sharper, but the plumbing behind it—connectivity, normalization, ongoing maintenance—doesn’t need to be rebuilt every time market structure shifts.
| In-House Build | Hybrid Platform Approach | |
| Primary Focus | Latency-critical core strategies | Geographic expansion, 24/5 trading, secondary markets |
| Maintenance Burden | Heavy exchange-directed updates and feed normalization | Feed handlers and hardware maintained by the platform |
| Time to Market | Up to 3.5 years for custom FPGA builds | Weeks to months via normalized data delivery |
| Capital Allocation | High upfront hardware and co-location cost | Flexible spend that scales with volume |
What Does This Mean for Firms?
This is exactly what Exegy builds for. Axiom is engineered to consolidate data across asset classes, geographies, and 24/5 trading sessions into one platform, so firms can add a market or plug into a new consolidated tape feed without rebuilding their stack.
The firms that come out ahead won’t be the ones running the most servers. They’ll be the ones with technology that can quickly absorb whatever’s next, so their teams stay focused on what actually benefits customers.
Want the comprehensive data behind these shifts? Read the full whitepaper, The Infrastructure Tax of Total Market Access, to get the complete picture of the Everything Everywhere market and what it means for building trading infrastructure in 2026.
