But Niki Beattie, chief executive of Market Structure Partners said the status quo already favours major investors, and a single data source could help level the playing field.

“Without consolidated data, retail and institutional investors are the victims of arbitrage as they do not have a complete set of data from which to drive their decisions,” she told FN. “The handful of market participants who can currently afford to piece together all the market data can profit from this by spotting anomalies.”