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Exactly right.
I did however do something quite neat with the dax index many years ago (working at a small prop shop trading the futures on DTB)
We noticed that the index quote on our machine was pretty slow, as it was obviously calculated before it was sent out (probably same story for all the providers). As the dax only has 30 stocks or so, we simply took the individual stock feeds (which were much quicker to update), jammed them into a spreadsheet and updated the carry adjustment each morning to get a view on what the next tick in the futures was gonna be. Sometimes we'd know 3-5 seconds before our screens told us, that there was gonna be a big up or down tick in the dax cash index and hit the futures accordingly. Worked really well in slow markets, and not at all once the S+P pit opened in the afternoon.
Don't think it would work as well now as processor speeds are that much greater but was pretty cool at the time.
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