Where Your Market Data Lives: On Your PC, Data Fees and Exchange Licensing

Most traders think of market data as something that simply arrives. You connect, the ladder fills in, the candles start printing. But every price on your screen is a licensed product. The exchange owns it, a licensed distributor carries it, and you receive it under terms you agreed to, usually with a checkbox you clicked once and forgot.

Those terms decide what you pay each month, what you are allowed to do with the data, and who has to count the screens you watch it on. They also raise a question traders rarely ask: once the data reaches you, where does it actually live?

This article follows CME Group market data from the exchange to your PC, explains the professional and non-professional distinction, sorts out who charges which fee, and finishes with what to look for in how a platform stores the data it receives.

The Chain: Exchange, Distributor, Subscriber

CME Group runs four exchanges, CME, CBOT, NYMEX and COMEX, which its licensing documents call designated contract markets. Each publishes market data from its matching engine, and CME Group licenses that data to the firms that pass it on.

There are three roles in the chain:

1. The exchange owns the data and sets the license terms and fees.
2. The distributor holds a license from the exchange to receive the data and pass it on to subscribers. Your broker or your data connection (Rithmic, CQG, TradeStation and others) fills this role, directly or through partners.
3. The subscriber is you: the person receiving the data to view it.

CME's subscriber terms are built around devices. Its licensing documents define a device broadly, as essentially any display unit that can access, receive, process or display CME data, and they require distributors to report device counts to CME every month.

This reporting is why your data provider asks you for details when you sign up. Rithmic, for example, notes in its FAQ that it "is required to retain information you provided to the exchanges as part of their reporting requirements." The exchange needs to know who is receiving its data and under which category.

Professional or Non-Professional: The Question That Sets Your Fee

When you first connect, your broker or data provider asks you to certify whether you are a professional or a non-professional subscriber. The answer changes what the exchange charges for the same data, so it is worth understanding what it means.

What Non-Professional Means at CME

CME's subscriber terms define a non-professional, broadly, as an individual (or certain small business entities) who uses the data for personal trading and to manage their own assets, and who is not acting for a brokerage, bank or investment firm. CME's terms list further conditions too, such as holding an active futures trading account and not being registered as a professional trader or investment adviser.

Two points from CME's own guidance are worth remembering:

• Every condition counts. CME's market data FAQ states that all criteria must be met to qualify for the non-professional subscriber rate. Meeting most of them is not enough.
• You certify, and you update. CME's guidance says a trader who meets the criteria completes a self-certification with their data provider, and that a trader whose status changes needs to tell the data provider.

The exact conditions are set by CME and can change, so read the certification your broker gives you rather than relying on a summary, including this one.

Common Situations to Think Through

• Trading your own account from home. This is the typical non-professional case, provided you meet every condition in the certification.
• Trading through an entity you set up. Some small entities can qualify, but the conditions are specific. Check before you certify.
• Working in the industry. If your job involves trading or advising for others, your status may be professional even for your personal account.
• Funded and evaluation accounts. How a prop firm account is classified depends on the firm's arrangement and the exchange's rules. Ask the firm.

If you are unsure, ask your broker before you certify. Getting it wrong in either direction is a problem: overpaying is the lesser one.

What You Are Paying For

Exchange data fees have a few dimensions, and seeing them separately makes a data bill much easier to read.

Top of Book Versus Depth

CME's fee list prices top-of-book data separately from depth-of-market data. Top of book is the best bid and the best offer with their sizes. Depth adds the price levels behind the best bid and offer. If you trade from a DOM, you almost certainly need depth.

Per Exchange, or a Bundle

CME's fees are listed per exchange, and its fee list also offers a bundle rate for a non-professional subscriber entitled to all four CME Group exchanges. Different products are listed on different exchanges within the group, and each contract's specifications name the exchange it trades on. A trader who watches equity indexes, energy and metals side by side is usually drawing data from more than one of the four, so check which exchanges your markets belong to before you choose a package.

Per Device

Because fees are tied to devices, the number of screens or computers receiving the data can matter. Ask your provider how they count devices for your subscription, especially if you trade from more than one PC.

Who Charges What

Three parties can show up on your bill, and they are easy to mix up:

• The exchange sets its data fees and publishes them in a fee list that it updates from time to time.
• Your broker or data provider collects the exchange fees from you and passes them on, and may charge for its own connection or software. Some brokers waive some data charges based on your trading activity; TradeStation, for example, lists conditions for its futures data packages on its futures page.
• Your platform may charge its own license fee, separately from the data.

We don't quote amounts here, because every one of them changes. Ask your broker for a current, itemized breakdown.

Display and Non-Display Use

Exchange licenses distinguish data shown to a person from data consumed by software. CME's licensing documents treat non-display use, such as data feeding an automated trading system rather than a screen, as a separate category, licensed directly with CME.

For a discretionary trader watching charts and a DOM, this is rarely an issue. If you run automated strategies on exchange data, ask your broker how non-display licensing applies to you before you start, because it is a different license from the one that covers your screens.

Where the Data Actually Goes

Licensing covers who may receive the data. Storage is about where it sits once it has arrived. When you open a chart, three kinds of data are involved, and each can be handled differently.

Live Data

Live data streams from your connection to your PC: trades, quotes and, if your subscription includes it, depth. It is used the instant it arrives, to update the ladder and the current candle.

History

When you open a chart, the platform needs past bars to draw. That history has to come from somewhere: your broker's history service, or a copy the platform kept from earlier. Your broker's history service is limited by what the broker offers and how quickly it answers. A local copy depends on what the platform saved.

Order Flow Around Your Trades

If you review trades later, the most useful data is often the order flow at the moment you traded: the ladder, the prints and the delta around your entry and exit. To show that later, a platform has to keep it.

On Your PC or in Someone's Cloud

Platforms store data in two broad ways. Some keep it on servers they run, and stream history to you from there. Others keep what your broker sent on your own PC. Both are workable designs, and each comes with trade-offs worth understanding.

Data kept on your PC:

• Charts can open from local history without waiting on a network round trip.
• Charts can still be studied when the market is closed or your connection is down.
• The data stays in your environment, received under your own subscription.
• It uses disk space, and should be protected like any other personal data on your PC.

Data kept on a provider's servers:

• History is available on any machine you sign in from.
• You depend on the provider's network and servers to load charts.
• The data now sits in the provider's environment, so their own licensing and security become part of your picture.

Whichever design your platform uses, a few questions are worth asking: Is stored data encrypted? Can you choose how long it is kept? Is there a limit on disk use? And does anything you store ever leave your machine?

A Worked Example: How Big Is a Year of History?

People often assume that keeping history locally needs huge disks. It depends entirely on what is stored. The numbers below are illustrative assumptions, chosen to make the arithmetic easy, not measurements of any platform or market.

Minute bars. Say a futures contract trades about 23 hours a day. That is roughly 23 x 60 = 1,380 one-minute bars per day. If each bar (time, open, high, low, close, volume) took an assumed 40 bytes before compression:

• Per day: 1,380 x 40 = 55,200 bytes, about 55 KB
• Per year of about 250 trading days: 55 KB x 250 = about 13.8 MB

Trade-by-trade data. Now say an active contract printed an assumed 500,000 trades on a busy day, and each trade took an assumed 16 bytes:

• Per day: 500,000 x 16 = 8,000,000 bytes, about 8 MB
• Per year: 8 MB x 250 = about 2 GB for one contract

The lesson from the arithmetic: bar history is small, even for years of it. Trade-by-trade history and depth are what take space. That is why sensible local storage keeps the bars you chart by default, lets you choose how long finer data is kept, and puts a ceiling on total disk use so older detail rolls off rather than filling your drive.

A Second Example: Reading a Data Bill

Here is how an itemized bill might look for a hypothetical trader. Every label and line is invented for illustration; real line items and amounts vary by broker.

• CME Group exchange data, non-professional, depth: charged by the exchange, collected by the broker
• COMEX exchange data, non-professional, top of book: charged by the exchange, collected by the broker
• Connection or routing fee: charged by the broker or data provider
• Platform license: charged by the platform company

If your bill shows one combined "data" line, ask your broker to split it out. Knowing which line belongs to whom tells you who to call when something changes, and which costs follow you if you switch brokers or platforms.

Checklist: Your Market Data in Order

• Know your category. Read your certification and confirm you meet every condition for non-professional status, or certify as professional.
• Update your status. If your job or situation changes, tell your data provider, as CME's guidance asks.
• Match your data to your trading. Top of book for charts alone; depth if you trade from a DOM; the exchanges you actually trade.
• Ask for an itemized bill. Exchange fees, connection fees and platform fees on separate lines.
• Ask about devices. How your provider counts PCs and screens for your subscription.
• Check automated use. If software trades on the data, ask about non-display licensing first.
• Know where your history lives. On your PC or on a provider's servers, whether it's encrypted, and whether anything leaves your machine.
• Set retention and a disk limit. Keep what you chart; let older fine detail roll off.

The Bottom Line

Market data is a licensed product with a clear chain: the exchange owns it, your broker or data provider distributes it, and you receive it under terms that set your fee. Your professional or non-professional status, the depth you subscribe to and the exchanges you watch decide what you pay. Where the data lives after it arrives is a separate choice, made by your platform, and it is worth knowing which choice yours has made.

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