What does it mean that market data is provided under a contract, and what should a public website refuse to republish? This note teaches that limit, using a consolidated equity tape as the example, without stating that any particular contract is held.
The tape is someone else's product
Exchanges and consolidators do not hand out a firehose as a public domain file. They distribute data under contracts that say who may receive it, how long it may be kept, and what may be shown to people who are not party to the contract. A website is exactly the kind of place those limits are easy to violate, because a chart feels like commentary. Commentary that reprints the underlying stream can still be a republication the contract does not allow. The educational point is the category. A derived thought may be publishable when the ticks that suggested it are not.
This page does not assert that the firm holds any given contract, and it does not describe a license number or a regulatory status. Those would be claims of a different kind, and they do not belong in a lesson. The lesson is that a reader should expect market data to be encumbered, and that a public article should be writable from public facts and from the author's own words. Where this website states its own terms, it does so at /legal. Where it states how it handles personal information, it does so at /privacy-policies. A data contract is neither of those documents.
A data contract is the permission and the limit under which a market-data product may be used. Internal study and public republication are different acts, and the second does not follow from the first.
What a consolidated tape illustrates
A consolidated tape of U.S. equities, the public idea of a last sale and a quote across venues, is a useful example because people see its contents everywhere and therefore assume the contents are free to copy. They are widely displayed under the rules of the plans and vendors that govern them. A research group that receives a feed for internal study does not thereby receive the right to paste the feed onto a marketing page, to offer a download, or to build a public terminal. The internal use and the public reprint are different acts. Policy treats them as different even when the underlying symbols, such as a widely traded share, feel public.
What can still be written is the mechanism. An article can explain what a tape is, why two tapes disagree, and why a minute bar is not the book. It can use a single illustrative price that is clearly a hypothetical, the way other notes on this site use a made-up inside market to show a match. It should not dump a session's quotes, a real-time montage, or a bulk history that only exists because a vendor delivered it. The hypothetical teaches the queue. The dump republishes the product. The line between them is the line a writer is expected to see before the page is drafted.
Personal data is a separate encumbrance and an easier one to state. A tape example does not require visitor logs, account names, or applicant files, and those files are not an alternative source of market data. Their handling is described at /privacy-policies. Mixing them into a market page would violate the research rule and the privacy rule at once. The site's general terms remain at /legal. Neither link is a data vendor's contract. The vendor's contract is not published here by being alluded to.
Write the lesson, leave the feed
The working rule for public pages is short. Explain the idea in original prose. Use public mechanisms and clearly marked hypotheticals. Do not republish a feed, a bulk history, or a real-time display that arrived under a contract. If a sentence only works because it contains someone else's stream, the sentence waits. The public site is not the place the stream goes to become content.
Data contracts are why a website cannot treat a tape as raw material for reprinting. The consolidated equity tape is the example of a product people mistake for a public file. This article states no contract and no status. Read /legal and /privacy-policies for the documents this site does publish about itself.
This piece does not claim that any particular data contract is held, does not republish a tape, and does not state a legal status. It teaches the limit. The site's own pages are /legal and /privacy-policies.
