Consolidated Audit Trail: The CAT’s Out of the Bag

The SEC recently released a plan to establish a Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT), one of the world’s largest data repositories that will contain a complete record of all equities and options traded in the US. The plan will require national securities exchanges and FINRA (SROs), alternative trading systems (ATSs), and broker-dealers (collectively, CAT Reporters) to submit information on trade events, including customers and prices, to the CAT on a daily basis. It is estimated that the CAT will aggregate between 30 billion and 120 billion trade events per day from over 2,000 sources.