Patent ID: 7124110

Claim:
A method of managing financial transaction messages relating to a tradeable object sent from a gateway device over a communication link to a matching process at an electronic exchange, where the tradeable object is being traded on the electronic exchange between buyers and sellers and where the tradeable object has an inside market comprising a highest bid price and a lowest ask price, the method comprising: receiving a data feed from the electronic exchange over the communication link at the gateway device, wherein the data feed comprises the inside market, which dynamically changes when there is a change in the highest bid price or the lowest ask price as a result of incoming transaction messages being automatically matched by the matching process at the electronic exchange, and wherein the incoming transaction messages are prioritized according to a time when the incoming transaction messages are received at the matching process before being automatically matched; defining an entity comprising a subset of the elements associated with the gateway device, wherein the entity generates a number of transaction messages that are to be sent through the gateway device to the matching process where the number of transaction messages will be prioritized with other incoming transaction messages according to a time each message is received at the matching process; assigning a limit associated with the number of transaction messages generated by the entity; receiving a transaction message from the entity at the gateway device; and if the assigned limit would be exceeded by transmitting the received transaction message to the matching process, queuing the received transaction message resulting in the received transaction message losing time priority at the matching process if the received transaction message is later transmitted to the matching process, or if the assigned limit would not be exceeded by transmitting the received transaction message to the matching process, transmitting the received transaction message to the matching process.