Exegy is offering a managed end-of-day packet-capture service for capital-markets market data, working with FMADIO and using the points of presence of its Axiom consolidated feed. Announced on 13 October, the product delivers raw market-data packets rather than only a vendor-normalised historical price series. For brokers investigating execution or feed behaviour, that difference matters: raw packets preserve the original message sequence and timing context needed to reconstruct what a receiver might have seen.[1][2]
The architecture uses FMADIO FPGA-enabled 40G and 100G capture appliances with hardware timestamping through Arista switching infrastructure. Exegy says it captures primary and secondary market-data services and checks for gaps. The timestamp belongs to that capture point, which must be reconciled with a broker’s own network path during incident analysis.[1]
Capture, delivery and retention are different controls
Service boundaries and customer responsibilities
| Feature | Vendor description | Remaining broker task |
|---|---|---|
| Capture | FMADIO FPGA 40G/100G raw packets | Check subscribed venues and feed entitlementSource 1 |
| Timestamp | Hardware stamp at capture point | Reconcile against client's own pathSource 1 |
| Validation | A and B feeds; gap checks | Confirm sequence and completeness for each eventSource 1 |
| Delivery | End-of-day Amazon S3 PCAP | Automate retrieval and access controlsSource 1 |
| Retention | 14-day file availability | Apply internal record-retention policySource 1 |
Raw daily PCAP files are delivered through client-accessible Amazon S3 storage, with an advertised retention period of 14 days. This is a short retrieval window, not a substitute for a broker's own legal books-and-records retention schedule. A firm that relies on the service for incident review needs an automated internal copy, checksums, access permissions and a tested process for restoring the record after the vendor window has passed.[1]
Exegy's quality controls aim to validate completeness of the primary and secondary feed capture. Data loss could nonetheless arise upstream or in a client’s own path, so the existence of a vendor record does not conclusively establish the contents of a broker's separately deployed network interface. Direct comparison must reconcile feed sequence numbers, timestamps, observed disconnects and differences between the vendor and client capture points.[2]
Useful for replay, but not proof of a good fill
Hardware timestamps make the feed suitable for latency benchmarking and historical replay. A broker may use such evidence to test what quotes were available when an order-routing decision was made, but the market-data capture alone does not contain the client order, broker decision, execution venue acknowledgement and complete best-execution rationale. Those records must be joined before assessing an individual transaction.[1][3]
Firms should also ask which exchanges and feed entitlements are included at a given point of presence, how the A/B captures are aligned and what happens if a file is missing. The product moves an operational capture burden to the provider; it does not remove client-specific licence, security, retention or reconciliation responsibilities.[2][1]
Sources & further reading
- New PCAP service offers FPGA-grade hardware-timestamped raw market data capture Exegy · 13 Oct 2026 · Accessed 30 Oct 2026
- Axiom end-of-day PCAP raw market-data service product sheet Exegy · Accessed 30 Oct 2026
- Exegy launches hardware-timestamped market-data capture service A-Team Insight · 13 Oct 2026 · Accessed 30 Oct 2026