ESMA released final techinical standards of MiFID 2

ESMA has finally released the final technical standard of MiFID 2 on 28-Sep-2015. There are still approval work to be completed but likely it will be in force soon and all European market participants would implement the standard in 2017.

While MiFID 2 is promotion trading transparency and safe trading, the impact it has to the industry seem to be major (i.e. for all to follow what they consider to be good practice). It affects all financial institutions which include the exchanges and their trading participants. It's for Europe but with globalization nature of the industry, all major financial institution worldwide would likely be affected.

I am not expect in the topic. Below one introduction I find quite useful to get some overview information on impact,

 MiFID 2: ESMA's second set of RTS

The  ESMA release note and link to the documentation are available below,

ESMA readies MiFID II, MAR, and CSDR

Being a software engineer, the discussion around accurate timestamping of the trade messages is quite interesting.  There has been debate/discussion around level of accuracy required and reference time requirement. The standard has settled to use UTC time as the reference time and satellite (a.k.a. GPS) could be used as a time source so long as accuracy could be maintained.  The compromise to allow GPS be used is good. I don't think it make sense to request all trading companies to have direct connection to the time labs in Europe to get accurate time.

If you are interested to know how accurate GPS time could be, Wiki may provide you the no-brainer answer.  If you want to have the mathematical proof, good luck!

Global Positioning System

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