The Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID), in its second iteration, kicks in January 3, 2018, across the European Union, but the effects will be felt worldwide. In the United States, the Security and Exchange Commission will begin to implement its Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT), which will make similar demands on the precision of timekeeping. The hope for both pieces of regulation is that major market-shaking events—or any market event of note—which may only last fractions of a second but may involve thousands or millions of transactions and hundreds of millions or billions in market value will be reconstructable with a high level of confidence and precision to see exactly what caused what.
