CAT Alerts

On January 28, 2020, the CAT NMS Plan Operating Committee approved parameters for when a CAT Reporter is required to self-report to the CAT Plan Processor, FINRA CAT, deviations of clock synchronizations standards required under SRO Rules and the CAT NMS Plan. FINRA CAT will use this information to evaluate the impact of the reported incident(s) on the quality of the CAT Data and to provide notice to the Regulatory Users of reported incident(s) that may impact their analysis of CAT Data.

The CAT Industry Member Test and Production Environments for Phases 2a and 2b are being rolled out with implementation of different types of validations, (i.e. data integrity, linkage) at different times. This CAT Alert describes the Industry Member CAT Reporting Test Plan for Phases 2a/2b and how Industry Members may leverage data submissions to the Test and Production Environments to test their compliance with linkage validations, prior to the formal Compliance Go-live dates.

The information related to this CAT Alert can be found in the Industry Member Onboarding Guide.

During CAT processing, Inter-venue linkage occurs for routes between two Industry Members, routes between Industry Members and Exchanges, and between CAT Trade Events and the related TRF Trade Reports. When such events are unlinked, CAT will provide feedback to both the CAT Reporter and the entity identified as the routing, receiving or reporting party.

On May 10, 2019 the Participants of the CAT NMS, LLC and FINRA CAT LLC published the Version 2.0 of the CAT Reporting Industry Member Reporting Scenarios document. This version incorporates industry feedback received since the publication Version 1.1 on March 29, 2019.

On April 29, 2019 the Participants of the CAT NMS, LLC and FINRA CAT LLC published the final version of the CAT Reporting Technical Specifications for Industry Members. This version incorporates industry feedback received since the publication of Drafts 1 and 2 of Version 1.1 published on February 28, 2019 and March 29, 2019, respectively

The CAT Technical Specifications for Industry Members require Industry Members operating ATSs (“Industry Member ATSs”) to populate the atsOrderType field on CAT Equity New Order and Order Accepted events. The description of this field states that it “Shows the ATS-specific order type as selected from a list of order types defined by this Industry Member via the Reporter Portal.” The purpose of this CAT Alert is to provide additional information regarding the mechanism that CAT will use to collect information regarding these order types.

CAT Alert 2018-004 has been retired. The information contained in this CAT Alert can now be found in the Order Routing Field Mapping between CAT and Exchanges document. 

CAT Alert 2018-003 has been retired. The information contained in this CAT Alert can now be found in section 2.4.1 the Industry Member Technical Specifications.