Financial Market Data Web Services – Xignite Blog

Many of the folks visiting our website looking for market data have previous experience with more traditional (or as we like to say legacy) data feed technology, but have not used Web services.   Or, they are new to market data in general and have difficulty cutting through all the technical detail and marketing-speak to make an honest appraisal of what is best for their application.  If this sounds like you, then take a look at this quick side-by-side comparison below.

To make a sound business decision, you need to ask yourself the practical question of “Why should I buy the cow, when I can get the milk through the fence?”  In truth, there can be very good reasons for buying the cow.  For example, you drink an awful lot of milk.  Or, maybe you are also a really big meat eater.  But, if your business isn’t dairy farming, then you are usually better off just buying the milk.

Contrasting On-demand Web Services and Data Feeds

(click on the image to enlarge)

Following this analogy, let me state out front that Web services are NOT right for every application.  If you are developing an algorithmic trading program that requires very low latency custom pricing data, or you belong to a gigantic financial institution that has a massive, centrally provisioned data feed, a strategic SOA initiative, and an IT department chock full of C++ programmers just waiting around for their next integration project, then you probably don’t need web services.  However, if writing custom data parsers is not your forte and fooling around with market data is not the core competency of your business, but merely a means to a higher value end, then we may have just what you need.

One often confusing element that is worth clarifying is that on-demand Web services are not only Web services, they are also on-demand.  That is, many market data vendors bundle application programming interfaces (APIs) in wih their feed products (often as a free add-on).  And, some of these APIs may support Web service standards or at least provide XML formatted output.  However, this does not change the business economics of buying data in bulk and deploying and managing the infrastructure to host and distribute it yourself, versus accessing it one transaction at a time over the Internet.