Consolidated tape

How it works

US equity quotes and trades do not arrive from one place. Every venue publishes its own, and they are merged into a single stream by the securities information processors — the SIPs — operating under national market system plans: the CTA and CQ plans for NYSE-listed securities, the UTP plan for Nasdaq-listed ones. Every US listed options quote goes through OPRA, which is the single processor for that whole asset class.

Three properties follow from being the plan-run stream rather than a commercial one.

It is complete across venues. A direct feed from one exchange shows you that exchange. The tape shows the market, which is why it is the regulated reference and why the National Best Bid and Offer is calculated from it.

It is slower. Merging streams from every venue costs time that a single venue's own feed does not spend, which is the entire reason firms competing on speed buy proprietary feeds instead.

It is cheap. The Consolidated Tape Association publishes a Schedule of Market Data Charges — the copy the plan itself links has not been restated since 2019, which is informative in its own right — setting the non-professional rate at 1.00 dollar per month per subscriber on each of Network A and Network B. Against 15 to 84 dollars for a single exchange's proprietary product, the tape is not where the money is. Non-display use and redistribution are priced separately on the plans as well, but the display figures are the cheapest on any schedule in this market.

What it carries, and what it has just started carrying

The tape has historically been a round-lot view: best bid, best offer, last trade, and no depth. The SEC's Market Data Infrastructure Rule, adopted in December 2020, set out to widen that — smaller round lots, odd-lot quotes, and depth of book — and implementation has run years behind. Odd-lot information reached the tape on the first business day of May 2026, and in an order dated 15 January 2026 the SEC exempted the plan participants from the odd-lot depth requirement until the first business day of May 2028. The same order still describes the exclusive processors as the things disseminating the data, which tells you how far the competing-consolidator model has actually got.

Europe is building the equivalent from scratch. ESMA authorised EuroCTP as the consolidated tape provider for shares and exchange-traded funds on 27 July 2026, with a transition period running to 30 September 2026. What that does to per-venue licensing is not yet visible in any price list.

Why it matters here

When a card on this site says real-time US equities, the question worth asking is whether that means the tape or a venue feed, because the two differ in latency, in coverage and by two orders of magnitude in price. A vendor bundling the tape — Alpaca Market Data is the plainest example in this catalogue — is buying at plan rates on your behalf and can sell a seat cheaply. A vendor selling direct feeds, such as Databento, is selling speed and depth, and prices accordingly.

The other thing the distinction settles is what a missing quote means. A "best bid" that came from one venue's feed is not the market's best bid, and a chart built from a single venue will disagree with everybody else's at the edges. If the number needs to match what a regulator, a broker or a counterparty would call the price, it has to come from the tape.

What real-time market data costs walks the four layers of fees that sit on top of all this, and who owns market data covers who operates the plans and who profits from them.