Financial Market Data Web Services – Xignite Blog

With 2010 quickly approaching, we wanted to celebrate the holidays with our friends & partners in the NYC Area. Join the Xignite crew for some good food, great drinks and special holiday gifts.

Hang-out with Xignite CEO Stephane Dubois and a handful of other Xignite’rs at Stout NYC, Thursday December 17th from 5:30p to 7:30p. We will be located in the Dart Alley Area of Stout’s Cellar.

While everyone that attends will be hooked up with the latest Xignite gear (shirts, USB’s, shot glasses, etc.), the first ten people to arrive will receive a very special gift pack, worth $50 each. We look forward to enjoying great food, cold beers and a quick dart shootout with our friends & partners in NYC.

I was reminded when we launched XigniteGlobalRealTime this week of how small the world has become. There was a time when traveling from Europe to my house in California would have taken months by sea, then months by covered wagon. Now I can make the trip in a single non-stop 21-hour flight. Granted, I have to brave the kid kicking the back of my seat, screaming babies, the guy with N1H1 to my right, and the guy to my left who spends all 21 hours trying to sell me life insurance while telling me his life story. But at least I don’t have to worry about scurvy… just airline food.

The world of market data has also gotten much smaller. Not too long ago, getting intraday stock quotes from Europe’s biggest exchanges was simply out of reach for any U.S. company that didn’t have a six-figure technology budget. Now even small startup companies on a shoestring budget can get real-time Level 1 stock quotes from even the smallest European exchanges, not to mention countless other exchanges around the world. What’s next? Frequent data miles for global market data usage? (Hmmm… Not a bad idea.)

If you search the internet looking for U.S. Stock Market Data, you’ve probably found as I have, that the experience can be fairly dry and unentertaining.  You will come across countless websites offering one data set or another, are often missing the critical data points you need, or conversely deliver way too much data for your projects requirements. 

Either way, once you tally up the combined costs of data feeds, network connections, servers, databases, manpower and integration, you will find that traditional delivery methods can be downright depressing.  Time and time again, we hear this feedback from new and prospective customers, telling us that they’re tired of the same old data song and dance.

Xignite's own Farris Pine, adding some fun to the U.S. Stock Quote videos.

Luckily, weve changed that tune with the rollout of our all new U.S. Stock Quote Section.  With this full section re-design, we have put the fun back in U.S. Stock Market Data.  We’ve stacked real-time, delayed and historical data together so you can easily compare and contrast what data sets work best for you.  We offer fun new video tutorials, handy data coverage comparisons, cool interactive demos, tons of helpful sample code and a wealth of easy to use Web service operations. 

With Xignite, you’ll be a rockstar for accelerating project timelines, accounting will love you for coming in under budget, and your developers might even take you to lunch for making their jobs so much easier.  Take a look at this new section by visiting http://www.xignite.com/stock-quote/20003.html.

One of the things we struggle with here at Xignite is how to explain what we do in plain English. We get a wide variety of visitors to our website from Wall Street traders who’ve never heard of a Web service to Ruby on Rails developers who think Corporate Actions is a Harrison Ford movie from the early 90′s. Add to this the fact that a Web service is an all but invisible product, then well you can see the problem.

We thought about writing a white paper on how Web services lower TCO over traditional data feeds….snoooze…even put us to sleep! So, instead we decided to go all out on video and take our best shot at making the mysterious benefits of on-demand market data and Web services a little more interesting. And, dare I say it…fun? Here is a sneak peak behind the scenes.

Landon Long (left), our in-house Steven Spielberg, deserves the credit for setting up the studio and coaching our young video stars to peak performance.

Currencies, Metals and More to Come
If you are a currencies or metals data customer, you may have already noticed the difference. Otherwise the upgrade still remains a little bit hidden, because we’re upgrading the website one section at a time. I was the initial guinea pig for the new XigniteCurrencies section just to get our process down. Lighting and color quality could be better, but overall we thought it came out OK. The less than HDTV resolution is intentional to keep the download time fast and the user experience positive.

You may notice a little quirkiness and familiarity, because we decided not to use professional actors. The people you see on the site are the same people who respond to your emails and answer your phone calls. Here is an outtake of Farris Pine who will star in the upcoming stock quotes section.

Mike Iacopi was second up for the new XigniteMetals section. Here he is in a short video tutorial on how to build a widget that fetches real-time gold and precious metal spot prices using the XigniteMetals Web service. And, we fixed the lighting problem!   Stay tuned for the appearance of your own favorite Xignite staffer!

After we roll out the rest of the website we’ll be moving on to more in-depth application case studies, technical tutorials, customer interviews, and maybe some more outtakes. Feedback and ideas are welcome. If you’ve got some Xignite-video of your own that you’d like to share, then please do. For example, here is a video the guys over at the SemanticWeb.com did on Xignite and Wolfram Alpha.

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What does the Albanian Lek, Dominican Peso, Indonesian Rupiah and 140 other global currencies have in common?  They can all be found in the newly updated XigniteCurrencies section.  Redesigned from the ground up, the new currencies section has been expanded to provide the tools and information necessary to get up and running with Global Currency Data.

In addition to covering over 85% of the world’s currencies, there are several improvements that we are very excited about.  First, we have expanded the section to include two new areas, one dedicated to providing detailed product information, and the other dedicated to providing comprehensive developer resources.  We have simplified the sites navigation, while also adding cool new features including several educational videos, expanded product information and an entirely new set of interactive demo applications.  We have even created a step-by-step video on how to get up and running with a simple real-time currency converter.  If you haven’t visited the section recently, you should give it a peek.

Product Resources - Currency Overview - - What Is On-Demand - - Live Forex Demos - - Global Data Coverage -

Developer Resources - How-To Video - - Getting Started - - Forex WSDL File - - Web Service Operations -

What’s most exciting are the countless ways our global currency data can be used. Our customers have proven that it doesn’t matter if you’re an Aviation Catering Company, Armored Transportation Service, National Menswear Retail Chain, Global Automotive Manufacturer or Cool Online Gaming Startup, with XigniteCurrencies, the applications are truly endless.

Everyone has been talking about how much smaller this year’s SIFMA Technology Management Conference was when compared with previous years, fewer exhibitors and fewer attendees.  But for Xignite, this year’s show was the biggest ever. If you missed us at this year’s SIFMA TMC, we hope to see you next year. Feel free to take a look at the 2009 Xignite SIFMA TMC Photo Gallery by Clicking Here.

Despite the fact that this year’s SIFMA Show was scaled down quite a bit, we were positively overwhelmed with demand at the Xignite booth.  Our staff of seven was slammed every minute they were on the floor, answering questions, giving product demos and handing out free Xignite goodies.  Even after show hours were over, our booth stayed filled with people wanting to talk about on-demand web services.  Even when walking the halls, I overheard many others talking about Xignite, our cool new products and exciting activities that we were sharing at the show.  In retrospect, I wish we had brought a staff of twelve to handle all the demand.

Maybe it was just the Xignite shot machine and free booze we passed out. For me, it was fun demonstrating how it’s a lot easier & cheaper to get data “by the glass” (aka on-demand) rather than getting data “by the fire hose” (aka bulk files and data feeds).  If it was alcohol that brought the hordes a-knocking at our booth, that would give a whole new meaning to the phrase, “generating buzz.”

Or maybe we saw so much demand because people just couldn’t resist the power of our free t-shirts, pens, mouse pads and other freebies.  Maybe it was the awesome VIP Event that we hosted at the Forbes Galleries. Or perhaps everyone heard about us from the recent publicity surrounding Xignite, like the amazing coverage in Inside Market Data or product announcements surrounding XigniteOnDemand and XigniteCorporateActions.

In truth, I don’t think any amount of publicity, bribery or booze could have generated the amount of buzz we saw.  Having talked to many at the show, I got a strong sense that people are more serious than ever about finding game-changing technology, like on-demand web services.  Over and over again I heard people looking for way to simplify data projects, dramatically cut costs and reduce the time it takes to delivery new data initiatives to market.  In these categories, Xignite is the only show in town.

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.