OATS Report - April 19, 2001

April 19, 2001

The March 7, 2001 edition of the OATS Reporting Technical Specifications states that the Order Received Date field on the New Order, Route, Cancel, Cancel/Replace, Desk, Execution, Combined Order/Execution and Combined Order/Route reports has been appended to include the time in the hhmmss format. This modification was installed to allow firms to more easily identify orders uniquely. By also including the time in the three-part-key, which includes Order Received Date, Firm Order ID, and Order Receiving Firm MPID, this field will allow firms to reuse order IDs provided the Order IDs are not reused in the same second. This allows firms greater flexibility in identifying their orders.

This enhancement has been made at the request of firms and is not required by the OATS Rules. Therefore, firms have the option to either 1) populate the time portion of the Order Received Date field with the proper time, or 2) populate the time portion of the Order Received Date field with zeroes. If firms feel that they are able to uniquely identify their orders without adding the time to the Order Received Date field, then the firm should populate the time portion of the field with zeroes. If neither the time nor zeroes are populated in the time portion of the Order Received Date field, then the order event will be rejected.

Firms with more than one entity submitting OATS reports on their behalf should coordinate with their transmitting Order Sending Organizations (OSOs) to ensure that they are either both populating the time portion of the field with the same time or that they are both populating the time portion of the field with zeroes.

If a firm chooses to populate the time portion of the Order Received Date field on a New Order Report, then it also must populate the time portion of the Order Received Date field with the same exact time on all subsequent order events. If the time portions of the Order Received Date fields differ between order events, the subsequent order event will be rejected.

Please remember that it is always mandatory to populate the time in the Order Received Timestamp field, regardless of whether the firm chooses to enter receipt time in the Order Received Date field.

If you have questions regarding this article or OATS in general, please call (800) 321-NASD.