PITCH

PITCH was originally developed at BATS Global Markets and implemented across its US equity exchanges—BZX, BYX, EDGA and EDGX. Following Cboe's acquisition of BATS Global Markets in 2017, PITCH was adopted across Cboe's broader suite of trading venues. Today, it is used not only on the former BATS and Direct Edge exchanges, but also on Cboe's options exchanges and the Cboe Futures Exchange (CFE).

PITCH enables the delivery of full order book information, which includes updates on individual buy and sell orders, such as adds, modifies, and cancels. It is primarily associated with Cboe's Depth feeds, which provide real-time market data at L3 granularity. This is contrasted with Cboe's TOP protocol, which is designed for real-time top of book (L1) quotations.

PITCH can be used with both multicast UDP and TCP as the underlying transport protocol, and as such is sometimes called Multicast PITCH or TCP PITCH respectively.

PITCH serves as the primary market data protocol for Cboe's European trading platforms—Cboe Europe BXE (formerly BATS Europe), Cboe Europe CXE (formerly Chi-X Europe), and Cboe Europe DXE—delivering full depth-of-book information with specific adaptations for European markets. Unlike its US counterpart, the European implementation includes "long form" message types to accommodate larger order sizes, wider symbols, and finer-grained prices, while optimizing bandwidth by transmitting these extended formats only when required. The protocol also incorporates Market Model Typology (MMT) flags, which provide detailed trade categorization in compliance with European regulatory requirements.

Beyond the trading platforms, PITCH is also employed by the Cboe Trade Reporting Facility (TRF) to disseminate off-exchange data, including OTC trades and Systematic Internaliser (SI) quotes. The European PITCH feed is organized into multiple matching units based on primary market groupings, with data delivered using the SOUP 2.0 protocol for sequencing and delivery integrity.