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I don't have regulations, but I believe all this info is shared with the exchange, so they know all your details for accounts at different brokers, etc. And of course, they want to determine if you are a professional, so that you have to pay professional data fees.
I could be mistaken but I'm pretty sure this is not a regulation requirement, but a requirement by the exchange. I don't believe all of them require an account to get non-pro fees.
I think it's reasonable to conclude that the industry was always considered pro not all that long ago. Introducing non-pro fees would have been for the purpose of capitalizing on the personal trader market that became popular a couple decades ago. If you think about it, what is the difference in the customer who is a pro, and a non-pro? The pro, uses the data for clients who have accounts.... the non-pro actually has the account. My guess, and it is purely that, is that asking for account information is a very small layer of assurance that the discounted fee isn't being exploited by pros who should be absorbing the fees from their clients... the actual account holders.
Yes, as already mentioned, first at all to see if you are pro or not.
It is always funny that people think they need data for charting (yes we need it for charting as well), but it is mainly for the order-execution
So the data-provider has to know all this information (for which account is this feed, that he can route it to the exchange). If you have 3 brokers and 3 account, you need the feed 3times and not just once .
I remember it the other way around. Everyone paid the cheaper fees up until a few years ago. Then pro and non-pro were introduced as a a way of getting groups considered "pro" to pay bigger fees.
Somewhere on the CME web site there is an explanation of the current policy, including the definition of who is a professional and who is not. I invite you to look, but their web site has recently been revised and I am out of patience in trying to find things there ( ). Possibly this is just me, but I once could find things and now there is too much marketing PR.
In any event, the answer is that CME, the major commodities exchange group, wants to charge traders transaction fees for any trades on any CME exchange, which will be part of the fees you pay per transaction. To do that, they want to be sure that you have an account, with money in it, with a broker, so you are in a position to do live trades.
They also want to impose monthly fees, payable monthly in advance, just to get the price data. The reason is simply because they have something people want, real-time price data, and they can charge for it. It's an income source for them. There is a difference in the monthly fee depending on whether you are a "professional" (higher) or a "non-professional" (lower.)
So you cannot get free real-time (non-delayed) trade data from CME, because it is a product they are selling. They provide it to data providers and brokers under those conditions, and that is why the requirement that you have an account applies to you.
You can get the data if you don't have a trading account, but you will have to pay the "professional" CME data fee for it, which used to be $105/month, but has gone up some recently (it doesn't go down .) Since CME operates four exchanges under the umbrella of "CME Group," you would have to pay 4 monthly fees if you wanted data for it all ( CME, CBOT, NYMEX and COMEX.)
Why? Well, because it's their product, and they can. It's that simple.
Bob.
When one door closes, another opens.
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote
I'm sure the rules have changed over time. I remember the same as Kevin, at least that essentially everyone was paying a very low fee. Then (maybe around 2013/2014, something like that) CME decided on instituting a professional fee for data, at a much higher level. (They may have had one all along, but no one cared.) There was a serious scramble by people to make sure they wouldn't be considered "pro," which I don't recall ever being a concern before. They also had/have a bunch of weird rules that everybody had to figure out. It is not just that you are trading someone else's money. I think they simply want to catch as many people as possible in the "You are a Pro" net. For instance:
"If a Subscriber has more than two access points to market data
on trading terminals/execution platforms per Distributor they
are considered a Professional Subscriber with each Distributor."
Whaaa? So if I have 2 connected "terminals/execution platforms" I'm OK, but not if I don't. (I don't know the definition of these terms. They may define them somewhere, but I don't have the patience to look. How about a PC at home, a laptop, a phone, a PC at work; do these count as four "execution platforms?.... just don't ask, I don't know. )
Trying to figure out why they do things the way they do leads to madness, in my opinion, until you suddenly realize: they can charge for this stuff. Then it becomes much more clear. This must have become clear to them also, about that time, and so the rates went up if you didn't declare yourself non-pro.
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When the exchanges went public they split the membership into trading rights and equity. The old members mostly sold of the equity and kept the trading rights. So now we have a situation that even though CME has bought up 3 of its competitors each of the 4 exchanges still have memberships that confer trading rights to those specific exchanges. So in order for CME to become one exchange they would need to address the complication of all the individual trading rights. Some of those rights/seats still have significant value.
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