Like chollida1 noted, it's more likely that pretty much everyone(even HFT outfits) are getting their data through one of the major providers like Bloomberg or Thomson Reuters.
The real difference between HFTs, online retail brokerages, standard brokers, and others, is the quality of service for the data that they're consuming. The more current the data you're getting, the more expensive it is. That's why the tickers on CNBC or Fox Business are 20 minutes delayed-that data is effectively free at that point.
For a HFT algo trading outfit, they're looking at buying the fastest, most expensive data, which is real-time full tick. That means that they're going to be getting every single quote and trade for a given instrument from the provider. I would imagine that the online brokerages are also consuming this data, because that would give them a slight edge with price matching for their clients.
For normal day traders or brokers, they're probably using a terminal provided by their data provider(i.e. Bloomberg Terminal, Thomson Reuters Eikon, or Thomson One). Since these are human display apps, there's a lot more lag time allowed, typically in the hundreds of milliseconds to low single digit seconds. Here, the data is often conflated, so multiple quotes are combined to show the last known data state for the instrument. This saves on bandwidth and processing time, which is good if you're not colocated at the exchange.
Even smaller (3-5 man) HFT shops I know of (and know people at) are typically building their own feeds directly off the exchange multicast feeds. When nanos matter nobody is going to trade on a consolidated feed.
The real difference between HFTs, online retail brokerages, standard brokers, and others, is the quality of service for the data that they're consuming. The more current the data you're getting, the more expensive it is. That's why the tickers on CNBC or Fox Business are 20 minutes delayed-that data is effectively free at that point.
For a HFT algo trading outfit, they're looking at buying the fastest, most expensive data, which is real-time full tick. That means that they're going to be getting every single quote and trade for a given instrument from the provider. I would imagine that the online brokerages are also consuming this data, because that would give them a slight edge with price matching for their clients.
For normal day traders or brokers, they're probably using a terminal provided by their data provider(i.e. Bloomberg Terminal, Thomson Reuters Eikon, or Thomson One). Since these are human display apps, there's a lot more lag time allowed, typically in the hundreds of milliseconds to low single digit seconds. Here, the data is often conflated, so multiple quotes are combined to show the last known data state for the instrument. This saves on bandwidth and processing time, which is good if you're not colocated at the exchange.