Market data glossary
Broker price feeds, in plain English.
A curated reference for the terms management, dealing, risk, and technology teams use when discussing a brokerage price feed.
- Short definitions written for mixed business and technical teams.
- Terms grouped by source, pricing, delivery, and continuity.
- Links to deeper guides where a definition is not enough.
Inputs
Understand venues, liquidity providers, reference markets, entitlements, and connectors.
Pricing
Separate aggregation, markups, spread rules, precision, and protection.
Delivery
Clarify consumers, endpoints, FIX, failover, monitoring, and configuration identity.
On this page
This glossary gives one practical meaning for the market-data terms most relevant to a custom brokerage price feed. It is not a protocol specification or legal definition; where a venue contract, platform manual, or FIX rule uses a term more narrowly, that source takes precedence.
Sources and market data
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| Term | Plain-English meaning |
|---|---|
| Ask / offer | The price at which the market or price publisher is offering the instrument. In a normal two-sided quote, the ask is above the bid. |
| Bid | The price at which the market or price publisher is bidding for the instrument. |
| Connector | The software-facing connection that receives data from, or sends data to, another system. Having a connector does not grant permission to use a venue’s data. |
| Instrument | The market item being priced, such as EURUSD, gold, a crypto asset, or a synthetic CFD. “Symbol” is often used for its system name. |
| Liquidity provider (LP) | A firm that provides prices and, depending on the relationship, executable liquidity to a brokerage or trading system. An LP feed can be one input to a wider pricing policy. |
| Market data entitlement | The contractual right to receive, use, display, or redistribute particular market data. Rights vary by venue and purpose. |
| Market data source | Any authorized origin of price information used by the feed: an LP, exchange, reference market, client platform, or proprietary publisher. |
| Quote | A price update, usually containing both a bid and an ask for an instrument. |
| Quote cancellation / withdrawal | An explicit signal that a previously available quote should no longer be treated as active. It is different from a source that silently stops updating. |
| Raw feed / raw API | A direct interface that exposes a source’s data with limited or no client-specific aggregation, commercial pricing, protection, or platform delivery added. |
| Reference market | A market used to provide independent pricing context. It may not represent the brokerage’s own executable liquidity or final client price. |
| Source mapping | The relationship between a venue’s instrument name and the stable symbol names used in the client’s pricing policy. |
| Tick / update | One new piece of market-data information. A tick does not always mean the price changed; it can also refresh state or availability. |
| Venue | The exchange, market, LP, or platform from which a quote originates. |
The market data source overview explains how institutional, exchange, reference, and client-owned inputs can enter one feed.
Pricing and aggregation
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| Term | Plain-English meaning |
|---|---|
| Aggregation | A defined policy for combining or selecting among several eligible sources. It can blend prices, use a median, choose a conservative range, or follow a priority order. |
| Average / mean | The sum of selected values divided by their count. Every eligible member influences the result. |
| Base price | The result of the source-selection or aggregation stage before the client’s commercial markups, spread rules, and final rounding are applied. |
| Client-specific feed | A feed with its own instruments, source roles, pricing rules, state, access, and delivery destinations for one client. |
| Conservative wide view | A policy that forms a cautious two-sided range from selected valid sources instead of choosing the tightest available quote. |
| Crossed quote | An invalid two-sided result where the bid is above the ask. It should not become normal client output. |
| Markup | An adjustment applied to a price as part of the brokerage’s commercial policy. Bid and ask adjustments can be fixed or relative, depending on the rule. |
| Median | The middle value after eligible inputs are ordered. It can reduce the influence of one unusually high or low member of a group. |
| Mid-price | A value halfway between bid and ask. It is useful for some comparisons but does not describe the full two-sided quote or its spread. |
| Minimum spread | A rule that prevents the final ask-minus-bid distance from becoming narrower than the chosen amount. |
| Precision | The number of decimal places or price increments used when publishing an instrument. |
| Price feed | A continuing stream of instrument prices delivered to a platform, bridge, application, or other consumer. |
| Pricing policy / rules | The client’s decisions about source eligibility, aggregation or priority, markups, spreads, precision, schedules, and selected protections. |
| Priority with fallback | A policy that uses the first suitable source in an ordered list and moves to another eligible source when needed. |
| Rounding | Converting a calculated price to the instrument’s permitted precision or tick step. A pricing policy should avoid rounding that creates an invalid or accidentally tighter quote. |
| Spread | The distance between ask and bid. It can reflect the input market, the brokerage’s commercial policy, or both. |
| Synthetic instrument / cross | An output calculated from other prices rather than taken directly from one identically named venue instrument. |
The market data aggregation guide compares common source policies. The pricing engine overview covers commercial controls and scheduled rule sets.
Validity and quote protection
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| Term | Plain-English meaning |
|---|---|
| Bad tick / abnormal jump | A price movement that fails the feed’s configured reasonableness rule for that symbol. The correct response depends on the agreed policy. |
| Eligible input | A source quote that is authorized, mapped, available, fresh enough, and otherwise valid for the current pricing rule. |
| Freshness | How recently a source or symbol produced a relevant update. Required freshness can differ by market and policy. |
| Gap protection | A control that can hold back an abnormal movement and retain the previous accepted value instead of immediately publishing the new value. |
| Invalid quote | A quote that cannot qualify because of its value, age, availability, order, or another defined check. |
| Latched protection | A protected state that stays active for review rather than clearing on the next ordinary update. An authorized operator can reset it under the agreed process. |
| Late / out-of-order update | An older update that arrives after a newer one. It should not rewind the accepted market state. |
| Stale price | A price that has not been refreshed within the policy’s permitted age. An open network connection does not by itself make the quote fresh. |
| Zero, negative, or non-finite value | An impossible or unusable numeric output for normal feed purposes. Such values should not pass as ordinary prices. |
Read how quote protection works and what the dashboard shows for the difference between protected, invalid, stale, and healthy state.
Delivery and integration
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| Term | Plain-English meaning |
|---|---|
| API | A defined interface through which systems exchange data or actions. An API says how to connect; it does not by itself define data quality, pricing policy, or operational ownership. |
| Bridge / integration layer | Software between the price feed and a trading platform or downstream application. It translates, routes, or applies the received prices where the client needs them. |
| Consumer | A downstream connection or system that receives the feed, such as a platform bridge, FIX session, risk service, or comparison tool. |
| Delivery endpoint | The authorized network address and service to which a consumer connects, or from which a feed connection is initiated. |
| FIX | Financial Information eXchange, a widely used protocol for electronic trading messages. CoinPriceFeeds supports FIX 4.4 delivery for agreed market-data workflows; the FIX Trading Community publishes the base specification . |
| Initiator / acceptor | The initiator starts a FIX connection; the acceptor listens for it. Either side can fill either role when the integration is designed that way. |
| Keepalive | A message or signal showing that a connection is still operating even when no market price needs to change. |
| Streaming feed | A continuing connection that sends updates as they become available, rather than requiring the consumer to request each price separately. |
| Subscription | The set of symbols a particular consumer asks to receive. Different consumers can require different sets. |
See FIX and streaming delivery options and the technology-team integration path .
Reliability and operations
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| Term | Plain-English meaning |
|---|---|
| Availability | Whether a service or quote is usable when required. Service availability, connection availability, and symbol availability are related but different measures. |
| Configuration fingerprint | A compact identity derived from the pricing rules loaded by a feed instance. Matching fingerprints help confirm that primary and backup loaded the same rule version. |
| Failover | Moving a consumer or workflow from the primary path to an available backup path. The owner and trigger should be agreed and tested. |
| Latency / delay | The time between relevant stages of a price update. Useful monitoring distinguishes upstream source delay, processing delay, and delivery delay where possible. |
| Monitoring | The collection and review of signals such as quote activity, source validity, delivery, connected consumers, delay, errors, and service health. |
| Primary and backup | Concurrent or prepared delivery paths intended to provide continuity. A second hostname is not sufficient unless its data, rules, network path, and failover process are verified. |
| Redundancy | The use of sufficiently independent components or paths so one failure does not remove the whole service. It must be tested to provide useful assurance. |
| Recovery | Restoring normal source, pricing, or delivery state after a failure while checking that the result is safe and current. |
| Verification | An evidence-based check that expected pricing, configuration, connectivity, or backup behaviour is actually present. |
The redundancy and monitoring and verification pages explain how these terms connect in operation.
How the terms fit together
A source publishes a quote for an instrument. The feed checks whether that input is eligible, then applies the client’s aggregation or priority rule to build a base price. It adds the agreed markup, spread, precision, and rounding, and applies quote protection before sending the result to a consumer.
A primary and backup endpoint can deliver the same client-specific feed. A configuration fingerprint, live comparison, and monitoring help the teams verify agreement before failover is needed.
For the complete sequence, continue with how a custom feed works or the written-first onboarding path .
A feed shaped around your setup
Have a requirement that does not fit a glossary term?
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