Revenge of the Red-Headed Stepchild: Corporate Actions
Like the red-headed stepchild of reference data, corporate actions have been easy to neglect for many years, given the time, expense and difficulty of automation. That is, until the financial crisis combined with globalization to turn corporate actions into a high-priority risk factor. Like a red-headed stepchild turned Class A felon, corporate actions now threaten portfolios with greater risk than ever.
Before the crisis, globalization had already brought corporate actions to the breaking point. Portfolios filled with a wide array of securities from companies around the globe naturally required a way to handle corporate actions from a wider array of companies adhering to a wider array of standards and regulations. Let’s face it. It’s not easy to build automated systems to handle an increasingly diverse set of data delivered through an ever more diverse set of technology standards. So, it was easy for corporate action automation projects to fall off the bottom of the priority list.
But now, with the global financial crisis in full swing, the good old days of being able to neglect corporate actions appear to be over. As companies seek to respond to the crisis, they’re issuing a flood of new corporate actions to reorganize, inject new capital, retain cash and accomplish a host of other creative financial solutions. For investors and asset managers, it’s as if the red-headed stepchild is on a rampage, knocking over IT’s system building blocks, breaking analysts’ economic models for valuing securities, and generally making asset managers lose their hair.
I wish I could claim it was prophetic that we timed the release of XigniteCorporateActions to coincide with the up-surge in demand we’re seeing for automating corporate actions, but it was really more a matter of luck than foresight. Still, it’s hard to imagine a time when on-demand financial web services for corporate actions data was needed more than right now.
So, if your red-headed stepchild has been begging to go to juvie in recent months, here’s a little tough-love parenting tip: Don’t waste the next nine months trying to build your own data management prison to contain your corporate actions problems. Just dial the Xignite emergency number and ask for an on-demand web service that can lock up your corporate actions problems in a matter of weeks instead of months.
Back to Basics with New Global Fundamentals Web Service
If there’s a silver lining to the global financial crisis, it’s the renewed appreciation for business basics. In this period of uncertainty, company fundamentals and long-term prudence have taken center stage in place of wild-eyed speculation and short-term gains. One anecdotal example of this trend is the steady increase in demand for XigniteFundamentals, now our seventh most popular web service, providing U.S. company fundamentals and financial data.
In fact, a new appreciation for fundamentals could very well be the solution to the current crisis. Many large, successful companies originally started during tough economic times. Just a few examples include Google, Microsoft, FedEx, CNN, GE and HP. These companies might not have survived their trying early years without an intense focus on the core fundamentals that drive profitability and long-term growth.
In response to this back-to-basics trend, we’ve just launched a new web service, XigniteGlobalFundamentals, providing global company fundamentals for securities listed on many major exchanges outside the U.S. The service provides market cap, earnings per share, p/e ratios, and beta for companies around the globe. Check out XigniteGlobalFundamentals for yourself.
Going BATS Over Real-Time Stock Quotes
If you’ve wanted to add real-time stock quotes to your public website, but just couldn’t justify the cost, you’ll want to learn more about BATS. No, not the baseball equipment or the “rats with wings.” The BATS stock exchange. As it happens, BATS is the third largest stock exchange in the world, covering 8,000 securities and processing over 10% of U.S. trades. Stock for most public companies are traded on BATS regardless of the exchange that lists them.
BATS has very web-friendly licensing terms for public display of its stock quote data, and we’ve just recently launched two new web services for getting stock quotes from BATS: XigniteBATSRealTime and XigniteBATSLastSale. Websites can publish BATS stock quotes without needing to sign exchange agreements that tie them to per-user or per-hit fees.
BATS has made adding stock quotes to web sites easy and affordable
We originally launched XigniteBATSLastSale to give our customers real-time quotes from BATS-traded securities. More recently we’ve launched XigniteBATSRealTime for customers with heavier usage requirements. In XigniteBATSRealTime, we’ve added data that’s more important for intraday traders, such as tick-by-tick quotes and bid and ask prices.
So, if you’ve been waiting for real-time stock quotes to become more economical for public display on websites, it’s time to take another look at your options.
IndexOasis.com Launches with New Index Components Web Service
Index Oasis, a company focused specifically on index analysis, is helping financial advisors, money managers and investors to manage their portfolios more wisely, with a web-based software platform. At the center of the Index Oasis system is a new web service offered by Xignite, XigniteIndexComponents. This Financial Web service provides lists of securities and weightings that are used to calculate over 40 U.S. stock indices. While XigniteIndexComponents is a fairly simple service, it is the industry’s first on-demand Web service to provide Index Component data.
To us, Index Oasis illustrates how companies can leverage our on-demand platform to obtain only the data that is needed, without the heavy up-front investment in infrastructure, ongoing maintenance costs and lengthy development efforts. By utilizing Financial Web services, Index Oasis realized huge savings in time, development and infrastructure investment, accelerating time to market by 35% and reducing data integration to fewer than 10 lines of code. This is what Xignite Web Services it is all about, saving time, effort and money.
If you’d like to read more, there is more detail in this feature article by Inside Market Data (you’ll have to register if you are not a regular reader of the site), or you can check out the index components press release.
Forbes.com to Present at Cloud Computing Expo in NYC on 3/30
If you will be in NYC for the Cloud Computing Expo on March 30, then be sure to check out the Forbes.com - Xignite session. While much of the program is how-to/technical in nature, this will be one of the few real world cloud computing case studies presented at the Expo.
Click the image for a full session description
We’ll be discussing how we brought BATS Exchange real-time quotes to Forbes.com using the Xignite financial Web services platform and Amazon Web Services EC2. Many thanks to Forbes.com for getting us up with the allstar list. Great headshot Jeff!
kaChing’s API Developer Garage Event, 2/21
Over the weekend of Feb. 21st, kaChing was kind enough to open their doors to developers, market professionals, and armchair fund managers alike, inviting all over Facebook and other social sites to take a sneak peek at the API they’ve been developing, enjoy some East Coast-style pizza, and develop the applications they hope will bring even more would-be financial visionaries into the fold. Over the past few months, they’ve been building an API that mimics the functionality already available over Myspace, Facebook, and their own site, the varied nature of their platform giving them a clear head start. As is evident from documentation—the Design Guidelines going into such detail as type covariance—they’ve spent a lot of time and effort making the process of developing a kaChing-capable app as straightforward and easy as possible. The API itself is a RESTful one, returning JSON objects explained in the Wiki, and is complemented by a Java client exposing their own domain model, and a Javascript library, mandatory for use in browsers due to Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) constraints.
Photos from the kaChing Garage Event
In addition to the functionality provided by the API directly, we’ve partnered with kaChing to provide access to Fundamentals, Financials, Historical and Split/Dividend data via Splice to users of the kaChing API at no charge. Just sign up for a kaChing API key, and…you’re done! As always, Splice is free to create custom mashups of Web Services, so it’s easy to sign up for other trial services and create an even more empowered application. At the time of writing, there’s only one third-party application published to their App Directory, so there’s still time to develop a great first-mover app powered by kaChing and Xignite for your favorite platform. Get rolling!
Related links:
- Photos from the Garage Event
- Directory of kaChing API Apps
- kaChing/Xignite Registration Information
- kaChing API Wiki
- API Google Group
- kaChing Main site
Mashing up Financial Market Data with NetworkWorld
If you’d like to know what financial market data web services and mashups can really do for you in plain English, then check out the latest NetworkWorld interview with the expert (our CEO Stephane!).
Click on the image above to go to the NetworkWorld podcast.