ELEKTRON REAL TIME MIFID II MASTER RIC USER GUIDE Introduction to the Master RIC and why its important for MIFID II content. Document Version 3.2 Date of issue: 19 October 2018 Master RIC Guide Elektron is an industry leading suite of data and trading propositions, incorporating low latency feeds with an analytics, enterprise platform and transactional connectivity to support any workflow application. Elektron Real Time is the consolidated feed service. New venues and changes to existing venues were made throughout 2017 in response to the MiFID II regulation, with additional venues being added through 2018. For more detail, please refer to the roadmaps . Overview Elektron Real Time launched six new APA venues on 3 Jan 2018 with fourteen additional APA venues in scope for 2018. It also applied MiFID II related changes to 57 global exchanges already delivered on Elektron Real Time. This note provides an overview of the a new capability which allows consumers of APA content to optimize their discovery and consumption of APA pre-trade and post-trade instruments ensuring that their application receives the first trade or quote report associated with any reported instrument. Because of the almost infinite number of instruments that are now required to have trades reported on them to an APA, and the difficultly in knowing the full scope of potential instruments to monitor. The solution to the capacity and subscription race condition is addressed using a broadcast instrument called the Master RIC. The target audience is anyone with an interest in application development or management of a market data platform such as our Enterprise Platform within a firm looking to subscribe to the new APA services. To summarise, the principal benefits delivered by the Master RIC are: Ease of discovery of trade and quote reports via a small number of asset class specific instruments Ensures capture of all trade and quote reports including the initial report which creates the individual instrument for an ISIN on the network which is also transmitted through the Master RIC which can application can keep on watch Easier capacity management within a client market data environment, such as TREP, where capacity is based upon instrument subscriptions Master RIC Guide 2 Version 3.2 Master RIC Guide Current Instrument Subscription Paradigm An Instrument in the context of Elektron Real Time content has historically mapped to a set of facts (also referred to as fields) pertaining to a financial instrument. For example the company Vodafone has an equity trading on the London Stock Exchange. This is represented via an instrument indexed by the Reuters Instrument Code (RIC) – VOD.L. The instrument for VOD.L viewed via an Eikon Quote display is illustrated below in figure 1. Figure 1 - Standard RIC Subscription via an Eikon Quote Object From an application perspective, instruments can be accessed by retrieving instruments using the RIC; complex requests for multiple instruments are supported but still result in a single instrument being processed for each security or company. This is often referred to as a by-interest subscription where an interest list is often presented well in advance of the opening of a market as the existence of the instrument is generally advertised well in advance of the instrument being active on Elektron Real Time. MiFID II Challenges to This Paradigm MiFID II is improving price disclosure and transparency for OTC traded instruments. Many trades in e.g. OTC derivatives have to be published via Approved Publication Arrangements (APA). Many of those instruments are however illiquid or instead of a simple trade, their nature would require an offsetting deal using a similar instrument as opposed to the same instrument. Hence after the first trade we may not see any more trades in this specific instrument again in a lot of cases. The introduction of very granular level instruments could potentially explode the number of instruments presented in the Elektron Real Time database by a factor or even magnitude once delayed data services are taken into consideration. The net result is that maintaining the status quo for the collection and distribution of this content is not an efficient means of providing this content to an application consumer. The figure below illustrates the differing capacity dynamics at play with Equity and OTC content, and the applicable subscription paradigm. Master RIC Guide 3 Version 3.2 Master RIC Guide By-interest y retrieval paradigm t i d – RIC: Security 1:1 i u S q E i I L Broadcast retrieval T I U paradigm – RIC: Q Security 1:N E FX AND OTC DERIVATIVES Instrument Universe Figure 2 - Contrasting Characteristics of the Equities and Derivatives Markets Another drawback in the by-interest subscription delivery paradigm with respect to the APA content is that by the time that an instrument’s existence is detected, the first update which resulted in its trade report may be lost by a consumer of real-time where back to back trade reports have already been published for the same instrument via the same APA. The solution to the capacity and subscription race condition is addressed using a broadcast instrument called the Master RIC. The Master RIC is a pseudo instrument created for the APA provider (or Contributor ID – CID - within an APA) through which, all trade reports are transmitted. Thus, if an application subscribes to the Master RIC for an APA, all trade and quote reports published by that APA irrespective of underlying instrument will be received. This avoids the need for significant extensions to the client watch-list subscription and avoids the loss of the initial trade report. This broadcast paradigm can be provided for this content because of the relatively low liquidity, as illustrated above, which translates into the traffic profile attracted by the instrument. This paradigm is not generally applied to Equity content where the markets are significantly more liquid, and instruments known in advance in the main. Master RIC Behaviour Master RICs are not set to cache within our systems, so you will only see the first tick after you subscribe to the initial RIC in the image. This means two applications subscribing to the content at slightly different times could see differing results until the next tick is published. This is different to the way individual instruments are represented. Other options to the Master RIC In parallel we will continue to have the individual instrument RIC (based on the ISIN) available to use as well. Please be aware that whereas the underlying instruments exist only for four weeks from the last trade report, the Master RIC will exist permanently on the network. Whilst there is no RIC linkage between a trade report published through the Master RIC and the underlying instrument for the ISIN, the RIC can be derived from the ISIN field combined with the Master RIC suffix Master RIC Guide 4 Version 3.2 Master RIC Guide Master RIC Symbology and Entitlement Separate Master RICs will be created for each APA venue, and within the venue, the content will be decomposed into a Master RIC for each MiFID Asset Class in the first instance, or assigned to either an unklnown or undefined Master RIC or as a last resort a Bucket RIC. All three concepts are described below. Asset Class Master RICs The symbology structure is based upon asset class code and venue CID – the examples below are for the Tradeweb MTF, OTF and APA services. For other APAs replace the four character venue id at the end of the RIC with that’s venue suffix. Master RIC Guide 5 Version 3.2 Master RIC Guide Table 1 Master RIC Symbology Each trade report delivered through the Master RIC will inherit the entitlement of the underlying instrument for the ISIN. A developer should only anticipate one product code per Master RIC as the Master RIC is defined by CID and asset class (or sub asset class). Each of the new APAs will have the full set of Master RICs available. However it should be noted that some APAs specialise in only certain asset classes, or indeed the market may chose to not report certain asset classes to a particular APA so some Master RICs may not see any activity. Unknown and Undefined Master RICs On top of the asset-class specific Master RICs there are two further Master RICs to catch any trade sent with an ISIN but for which we don’t know the asset class as we don’t have the reference data, or indeed the asset class sent is unknown or unrecognised. We will use MUNDF=XXX for trades sent with an ISIN and an asset class code that is unrecognised. We will use MUNKN=XXX for trades sent with an ISIN but without an asset class to assign to an asset class Master RIC. See table 1 above for examples Bucket RICs One final version of the Master RIC is a concept known as the Bucket RIC. This concept exists to ensure we publish out every trade reported to us by an APA. In most/all cases a trade will be published with an ISIN. However in a small number its possible no ISIN is available and as such it is difficult for us to classify and publish through one of the above asset class Master RICs. The Bucket RIC thus will publish out trades without an ISIN. The format for the Bucket RIC is MIFIDOTHR= with the suffix of the APA placed after the “=”. Eg Tradeweb APA would be MIFIDOTHR=TWEA Master RIC Guide 6 Version 3.2 Master RIC Guide Data Model On Elektron we have a general APA Data Model that contains all the fields available for the individual instruments RICs.