Stockt

Stockt is a fictional, platform-agnostic data standard designed to illustrate how stock market data can be represented and exchanged across systems. Created for theoretical and educational use, stockt envisions a uniform schema that abstracts away individual feed formats while preserving essential market information.

The core stockt model specifies fields such as ticker, asset class, exchange, price, volume, bid and ask, timestamp with high precision, currency, and data quality indicators. It distinguishes between trade records and quote records and supports both real-time streaming and historical backfill.

Implementation considerations include a modular transport layer, with options for JSON or compact binary encodings, versioned schemas, and optional compression. A stockt registry would provide instrument metadata and referential data (exchange identifiers, instrument identifiers) to ensure consistent interpretation across providers.

In practice, stockt is used in thought experiments and academic demonstrations to compare data integration approaches, latency budgets, and backtesting pipelines. It is not an official standard, and real markets rely on established protocols and vendor feeds such as the FIX Protocol and proprietary market data interfaces.

Critics note that, as a fictional construct, stockt must overcome challenges related to licensing, data rights, and governance before it could achieve real-world interoperability.

Related topics include the FIX Protocol, market data feeds, time-series databases, and data standardization efforts.