Financial Market Data Web Services – Xignite Blog

Our Customer Spotlight series showcases the innovative ways our clients are using Xignite’s Cloud APIs to power their applications.

AlphaClone is a San Francisco-based investment management firm that enables investors to “follow the smart money” with equity strategies that mirror the world’s top hedge funds. In addition to investment management services, AlphaClone also offers a powerful online research platform that investors can use to analyze stocks and to create and backtest their own cloning strategies.

Xignite sat down with Mazin Jadallah, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, to learn more about AlphaClone.

Q: Describe AlphaClone’s service offering.

Mazin Jadallah – AlphaClone is a SEC registered investment adviser and research firm. Our objective is to give investors actionable, cheaper, more liquid access to the investment ideas of the world’s top institutional investors. Our investment research approach, a process called “cloning”, utilizes top hedge fund public disclosures to construct and backtest equity investment strategies.

Q: Very interesting concept. . . does cloning actually work?

Mazin Jadallah – Yes, cloning the investment strategies of top money managers has been independently shown by academic and industry research to generate alpha returns. Read more

Our Customer Spotlight series showcases the innovative ways our clients are using Xignite’s Cloud APIs to power their applications.

Quantbench is a San Francisco-based start-up that combines a unique marketplace for non-traditional data sets, with a financial data analysis platform for financial analysts, academics and data scientists. This 100% cloud-based financial research platform provides its members with the data sets and tools necessary to conduct deep quantitative analysis.

Xignite sat down with Stefan Petry, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer, to learn more about Quantbench.

Q: Describe the Quantbench platform?

Stefan Petry – Quantbench combines a cloud-based platform for unstructured data exploration and analysis, with a marketplace where investment researchers and fund managers can purchase non-traditional data sets.

The platform includes data sets that we and others provide. Right now our members have access to more standard market data sets such as tick-by-tick and end-of-day stock data, and indices data. In time, we will be adding more and more non-traditional data sets that are sourced from areas like web search, online advertising, news, social media etc.  Users can perform analyses using R-Project and Amazon Elastic MapReduce. They can also purchase certain data sets in our marketplace for download and in-house processing.

Q: Describe the technology behind Quantbench and the advantages of Xignite Cloud APIs?

Stefan Petry – Perhaps the most innovative part of our approach is that we make it easy for our users to get up and running quickly. Everything that a financial analyst or data scientist needs to conduct quantitative analysis is instantly available. We are able to achieve this because the technology behind our community is 100% cloud-based. All of the analytical tools, data sets, and infrastructure are on the cloud. This approach also enabled us to launch very quickly, and will allow us to scale efficiently as our community grows.

We use Xignite’s market data cloud because Read more

Our Customer Spotlight series showcases the interesting ways our clients are using Xignite’s Cloud API’s to power their applications.

StockTwits is the leading social network targeted at the investment community reaching several hundred thousand users on StockTwits.com, and tens of millions through the StockTwits Distribution Network. Since its launch, StockTwits has garnered much praise, including being named by Fast Company as one of the 10 most innovative Web companies, and by Time Magazine, as one of the 50 best websites.

Xignite recently spoke with Francis Costello, Chief Operating Officer, and Chris Corriveau, Chief Technology Officer of StockTwits, to learn more about this fast-growing company.

Q: Describe the StockTwits community?

Francis Costello – StockTwits was founded in 2008 by Howard Lindzon, our CEO. At that time Howard saw the opportunity to create an investing community based around social media. The community allows investors to share their investing ideas in 140-character tweets, all in real-time. The value of StockTwits is very much based on the wisdom of the crowds concept, with 1000’s of our users all contributing to create a unique financial communications platform. StockTwits is fundamentally based on this social construct, and is very different from the more established financial media outlets such as CNBC, which involve traditional one-way broadcast communication.

Q: Why has StockTwits been so successful?

Francis Costello – I think there are two main reasons for StockTwits’ success to date. First, StockTwits created and popularized the “$(Ticker)” tag which Read more

Our Customer Spotlight series showcases the interesting ways our clients are using Xignite’s Cloud API’s to power their applications.

Xignite would like to introduce you to Personal Capital, which was just launched in September, but already has made quite an impact in the wealth management industry winning  “Best in Show” at Finovate Fall 2011, and being described by Bloomberg Businessweek as “Wealth Management for the Internet Age”.

Personal Capital’s goal is to offer a simple wealth management solution for the complex lives of their affluent clients.  The firm was founded by some of the leading financial technology and e-finance executives, and is backed by a well-known Silicon Valley venture capital firm.

We recently sat down with Bill Harris, Chief Executive Officer of Personal Capital, who was formerly CEO of PayPal and Intuit, and Jay Shah, Chief Information Officer of Personal Capital, who was formerly CIO of E-Loan.

Q: Why was Personal Capital created?

Bill Harris – We really created Personal Capital to fill a gap that most of us feel in our everyday lives, that is how to manage our financial lives, when everything is so fragmented.  Many of us have brokerage accounts, IRAs, 401ks, checking accounts, credit cards, mortgages, all strewn across multiple institutions, but there is no one place to go to make sense of it all. No one place where we can make a rational decision about our finances and plan for the future. Personal Capital was formed to allow people to make sense of their complex lives, in a comprehensive way, so that they can then take action.

Q: How does Personal Capital work?

Bill Harris – It really only takes 15 minutes to understand the power of Personal Capital.  The first 5 minutes you spend linking all of your accounts to the Personal Capital website. This allows Personal Capital to assemble a baseline of your financial situation on at least a daily basis.  The next 5 minutes minutes Personal Capital presents you with an easy to understand analytic framework that gives you a graphical representation of your entire financial situation. Finally, in the last 5 minutes we recommend the ideal asset allocation based on your financial profile and other factors. All of this is for free. At this point you can then decide whether you want to work with one of Personal Capital’s advisors so that we can help you manage and implement your financial plan.

Q: How is Personal Capital different from a more traditional wealth manager or investment advisor?

Bill Harris – There are a few significant differences but perhaps the biggest is the mode of interaction. With a more traditional approach much more face to face interaction is required, otherwise you don’t get very much visibility into your finances. At most you probably get sent a statement every quarter or so but that’s it. Just establishing your relationship with a traditional wealth manager can be a pain. It typically involves three trips to your advisor: (1) You drive to the advisor’s office to decide whether you want to do business with them. (2) You then get back in your car to go home to gather all of your financial documents into a shoebox and then deliver it back to the advisor. (3) Finally you return to the advisor when they have made sense of your financial situation and are ready to make recommendations. Obviously, this mode of interaction just doesn’t work for busy people. Personal Capital is different, we offer multiple ways to interact with us in real-time. We let our clients decide what works for them.

Q: Why has the wealth management industry evolved so slowly?

Jay Shah – There is no doubt that it has been slow. We have seen some innovation in the tools used by the wealth manager, but these are designed for the advisor and do not really impact the client directly. We’ve also seen progress on the self-directed side with online brokerage accounts but essentially the experience of the traditional wealth manager client has not changed much over the years.

Bill Harris – I think it has definitely has been slow. When I look at the last almost 100 years the two biggest innovations Read more

Our Customer Spotlight series is intended to showcase the interesting ways Xignite’s clients are using our financial market data web services.

StockTouch is an iPad/iPhone app that allows users to quickly understand in a very visual way the overall state of the stock market, and then drill down further to the individual stock level. StockTouch includes a groundbreaking interface that brings together the power of data visualization and Xignite’s financial market data. (Note StockTouch was also mentioned in last week’s Xignite blog post “The 3 Phase Evolution of Buy-side Mobile Apps”.)

Since its launch in June of 2011 StockTouch has already developed quite a following among both retail and professional investors alike. When StockTouch was first introduced the mobile app was immediately rated as “New and Noteworthy” by Apple’s iTune store. User comments have been very favorable including this one from Twitter that captures very nicely what people have been saying about StockTouch:

We recently sat down with Jennifer Johnson, who is CEO of Visible Market Inc., the firm responsible for StockTouch, to learn more Read more

The was plenty of market data cloud buzz at the 2010 SIFMA Technology Conference and Exhibition with NASDAQ and Xignite right in the center. Using the XigniteOnDemand Market Data Cloud Platform, NASDAQ plans to launch Data-on-Demand in the second half of 2010 to provide easy and flexible access to large amounts of detailed historical NASDAQ Level 1 trade and quote data for all U.S.-listed securities. Tick data is increasingly in demand for back testing of algorithmic trading strategies as the securities industry pushes the limits of high frequency trading.

Randall Hopkins, NASDAQ OMX’s Senior Vice President of Global Data Products, is quoted in the press release as saying: “Today our customers spend a large amount on technology infrastructure, not the market data itself. With Data-on-Demand, we want to drastically cut data management costs by running the technology infrastructure on the cloud for our clients and delivering to them the data they need, when they need it, and how they need it.”

NASDAQ discusses it’s market data cloud initiative with Max Bowie
of Inside Market Data at the 2010 SIFMA Financial Services Technology Expo

Obtaining and collecting tick data can be onerous and time-consuming as firms are required to establish feeds and maintain large amounts of data on-hand. On-demand market data distribution gives applications a way to cherry pick the specific subset of data that the application needs with pinpoint accuracy. Instead of combing through very large data sets of historical tick data, developers will be able to program their applications to select very specific data sets and obtain them on-demand and process them instantly. Data-on-Demand will also allow clients to download large tick data subsets on a scheduled basis.

We’re proud to announce that CME Group, the world’s leading and most diverse derivatives marketplace, is jumping on the cloud computing bandwagon and has agreed to use the XigniteOnDemand market data cloud platform to deliver OTC data from the cloud.

Brian McElligott, Managing Director of Information Products at CME Group is quoted in the press release as saying “With the ongoing development of our multiple OTC product and service offerings, and the need to deliver this data to customers with continued market transparency, the Xignite platform will be a quick and cost-effective way to get OTC pricing and reference data to our global market participants.”

Pete Harris of the A-Team Group interviews CME Group, BG Cantor and Xignite.
The A-Team Group gave the cloud prime coverage in their recent Q2 issue,
and Pete is launching a new “Market Data Cloud” channel, so stay tuned to that.

CME Group plans to offer on-demand access to end-of-day OTC settlement, volume and open interest data to support markets available through CME ClearPort®, a set of flexible clearing services open to OTC market participants to substantially mitigate counterparty risk and provide neutral settlement prices across asset classes. CME ClearPort currently clears more than 500,000 contracts daily, including Credit Default Swaps (CDS), energy, metals, agricultural commodities and foreign currencies. The service brings together more than 10,000 global users across the world including banks, hedge funds, trading entities, Inter Dealer Brokers (IDBs), Future Commission Merchants (FCMs), and clearing firms.