Operator of two of the world's largest stock exchanges and a provider of latency-management systems have launched a Web site that provides free real-time latency and data-transfer-rate information from market-data feeds used by electronic trading systems.

LatencyStats, developed jointly by NYSE Euronext and Corvil, was tracking two NYSE feeds when it was initially launched: ArcaBook and OpenBook. The plan is to expand it later by adding more NYSE Euronext US and European markets, as well as the feeds available through the SuperFeed platform, a normalized data feed from major US, European and Asian markets offered by NYSE Technologies.

"We believe that transparency enhances our customers' ability to better understand performance behaviors and monitor our progress in our endless efforts to improve our speed," Mark Schaedel, SVP of Global Data Products at NYSE Technologies, said in a statement. "By working with Corvil, we are able to provide both empirical evidence and transparent methodologies that our customers can trust."

Latency has been one of the top concerns for high-frequency trading companies, for whom reducing latency by a few microseconds means a substantial competitive advantage. Stock exchanges have recently been able to capitalize on this trend by offering colocation services in their data centers, enabling trading companies to cut latency by installing their servers in physical proximity to exchange servers.

The integration diagram of the latency measurement system used by LatencyStats: