Entitlement

How it works

An exchange does not meter bytes. It bills a quantity that your vendor declares to it every month, and the thing being counted is a permission rather than an action. Nasdaq's US equities and options data policies define the unit of count as a device, computer terminal, automated service, or unique user ID and password combination that is not shared and prohibits simultaneous access — and then say plainly who does the counting and on what basis: distributors report the total number of subscribers with the potential to access the information, unless the distributor can technically track actual usage for each one. Where a shared login allows simultaneous access, the count becomes the number of simultaneous accesses.

That single sentence is the whole of the word. An entitlement exists when a distributor has permissioned you, and it is billable from that moment until somebody removes it. Nasdaq closes the obvious workaround too: where many people share a limited pool of sessions, reporting is based on the number of subscribers, devices or users capable of reaching the data, not on the number of concurrent sessions. NYSE counts the same way in its own policies, which refer to display devices technically enabled to display market data.

The reporting machinery is where the word becomes visible. NYSE's market data policy package requires a vendor billing indirectly to report all entitled users for an organisation under one account number, per product, in a defined format, every month — and it will not aggregate one firm's users into another's. Two details in there tell you how seriously the count is taken. Retroactive credit adjustments older than sixty days are not honoured, so an entitlement left switched on is a bill that eventually stops being refundable. And a vendor that fails to report a month is auto-invoiced at its most recently reported quantity, which recurs until the reporting is brought current. The audit programme in the same document exists to check the entitlement control software against what was reported.

Where people pay twice

Brokerages are distributors. They buy non-professional entitlements in bulk, permission their own customers, and pass the cost through at a few dollars or absorb it, because live quotes are what keeps an account active rather than a product they sell. A retail trader who then buys a data API for the same venue is paying for two entitlements to one feed, and only one of them is being used.

The reverse trap is a dormant subscription. Because the count is capability, cancelling the habit is not cancelling the entitlement; the permission has to be withdrawn. On a per-venue product with several exchange add-ons — the shape IQFeed and Alpaca Market Data both have — that is several separate permissions, each its own line.

Why it matters here

Read the word wherever a card says "plus exchange fees", and read it as a count you control rather than a rate you accept. Three things follow.

Which venues you are entitled to is the number that moves the bill, not how much data you pull. A card offering thirty venues is offering thirty potential entitlements; a vendor that itemises them, Databento being the clearest here, lets you see the count. Whether you are entitled as a professional or a non-professional multiplies each one by roughly five, and that answer is the exchange's rather than the checkout's. And whether a program rather than a person consumes the feed leaves per-user counting behind entirely, which is non-display use — a different unit, priced per firm.

What real-time market data costs has the full fee stack and the figures each schedule attaches to a single entitlement. The sibling question of whether the data may reach anyone other than you is redistribution, which is billed per feed and starts before the first entitlement exists.