Direct Access to Nasdaq — ITCH 5.0 & OUCH 5.0

B2BITS provides deterministic, ultra-low-latency connectivity for direct access to Nasdaq markets, with native support for ITCH 5.0 market data and OUCH 5.0 order entry protocols.

The solution is implemented on top of the Nasdaq Financial Framework (NFF) and is designed to meet Nasdaq technical specifications, protocol conformance requirements, and operational guidelines.

It enables high-performance ingestion of multicast market data and low-latency order submission with predictable behavior under peak load.

Key characteristics include:

• Full protocol compliance with Nasdaq ITCH 5.0 and Nasdaq OUCH 5.0
• Optimized multicast handling, gap detection, and recovery
• Deterministic order-entry paths with minimal jitter
• Operational readiness for extended trading hours and 24x7 market models
• Deployment on bare metal or virtualized environments, on-premises or cloud

In addition to U.S. Nasdaq markets, the solution is compatible with multiple Nasdaq-licensed and NFF-based venues, including:

• Nasdaq Nordic
• Nasdaq Canada
• Nasdaq Dubai
• Armenian Securities Exchange
• Boursa Kuwait

This allows firms to operate a single, standardized connectivity stack across multiple Nasdaq-powered markets while preserving venue-specific protocol behavior and regulatory requirements.

Transport & Protocol Stack Overview

Nasdaq market access protocols are layered over well-defined transport mechanisms optimized for either deterministic order entry or high-throughput market data distribution.

• OUCH 5.0 uses SOUPBinTCP over TCP for reliable, ordered order entry and acknowledgements. (link to our doc)
• ITCH 5.0 market data is distributed primarily over MoldUDP64 on UDP multicast, with TCP-based recovery mechanisms. (link to our doc to Mold and Glimpse)

B2BITS implements these stacks in strict accordance with Nasdaq technical specifications, including sequencing, retransmission, and recovery semantics.

Nasdaq OUCH Order Entry

Nasdaq OUCH Order Entry Handler is preconfigured to fully support the OUCH specification for submitting orders and receiving responses:

• Supports all requirements of the OUCH interface, including:
  • Low-latency binary communication
  • Access to all Nasdaq market segments
  • Ability to send/receive raw binary data
• Supplied as a library (.dll/.so) with a user-friendly, intuitive API
• High performance: C++ implementation processes tens of thousands of messages per second on a single CPU with minimal latency

Nasdaq ITCH Market Data

FIX Order Entry