@Big Mike asked me to post this official advice in a new thread. I had just posted here (

AMP Futures / AMP Global Review Attached is the official CME notice of fee increase

) in relation to a question.

I am sure you have all been advised of this by now by your brokers - but this is the official CME advice posted by CME a couple of months ago.

As an aside you will see that for non professionals the Top of Book (ToB) data feed prices STAY the same. This is what I subscribed to. It has often surprised me how many traders appear to subscribe to full market depth and I wonder how many of those traders really use that data in their trading approach. ToB gives me best bid/ask price & volume as well as last traded price and volume.

I can see why CME would keep ToB pricing low and with no increase as the extra amount of data to supply full real time market depth must be a significant multiple higher than just ToB leading to extra bandwidth & CPU investment etc, more so the greater the number of subscribers who sign for full market depth.

Hi Steve

So with TOB you don't get any level 2 data right?

I cant say I'm consciously monitoring L2 or stacking/pulling. I just look at whats printing most of the time so wonder if I could downgrade without any impact to the way I trade?

You think I'd be alright with it?

Correct, I just get best bid/ask as mentioned in my post - no Level 2 data.

This is CME traded instruments only, other exchanges (eg Eurex, HKFE) don't seem to offer this split tier of data stream.

In addition, not all brokers will give you/offer you the ToB option even though it is offered by CME.

I am with AMP and they offered this ToB option right from when CME first imposed data feed fees for non professionals - so I have been on ToB for several years.

I also note that with this increase by the CME (for Level 2) a number of data providers have decided to impose an admin charge for collecting it. So for instance I use the CQG data feed (via AMP my broker) and CQG are adding an admin fee so this increases my ToB cost of $3 for the bundle to $4pm ie a $1 CQG admin fee.