Here's a sign of the times: NYSE Euronext and BATS are fighting over 500 milliseconds. That's the additional time that an order will be shown to some customers of BATS' new Bolt service. Bolt, which stands for BATS Optional Liquidity Technology, displays unfilled orders to BATS customers before either canceling those orders, or routing them to other markets. The service was launched June 5. BATS-only orders will linger for an additional 500 milliseconds of "additional order exposure on the BATS' data feeds," reports Finextra.

They also say that "routable Bolt orders expose an order to BATS members for up to 25 milliseconds before routing the order to away markets." The hope is that this would allow for additional executions. Both types of Bolt orders pay rebates for executions. These sorts of services are starting to crop up elsewhere, like the CBOE Stock Exchange and Direct Edge. According to Finextra, NYSE Euronext argues that the delay in routing orders "flies in the face of Reg NMS, which was introduced to guarantee best execution at the best price as soon as orders became available."

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