Financial Market Data Web Services – Xignite Blog

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.

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!

This month we put out a press release announcing Forbes.com as a customer, but as the account manager  I thought I’d give a little behind-the-scenes look at this project, because to me it illustrates what Xignite is really about.  Forbes was looking for a quick and economical, yet accurate solution to get real-time stock quotes on their website (as in not 15 minute delayed, but real-time). We tossed around some ideas and eventually landed on BATS Exchange as the best solution for their needs.  Unfortunately at the time, Xignite did not offer BATS Exchange quotes as a Web service.

While it’s not uncommon for us to add new operations or even entirely new services for clients, this was a much bigger project than the norm. But after all, it was Forbes.com right? In order to meet Forbes’ requirements we needed to add a brand new data feed and deliver streaming, self-updating widgets with real-time quotes at the traffic level of a Top 5 financial news site…on a tight deadline.

Now, being the “sales guy” (as in “so easy, even the sales guy can do it”) I’m used to promising a bit more than the engineering team appreciates–it’s my job.  Then, Leo (Xignite’s CTO) said we could pull it off in about 60 days. Now I’ve been in software sales for more than a few years, but this still made me a little nervous. As it turns out Leo knows a fair bit more than I do about our engineering capabilities, and with a lot of hard work and a few late night hours they provisioned a new feed for BATs, setup new servers, designed the widgets in collaboration with Forbes and pushed it all out to Amazon EC2 without a hiccup.

Who’s the hero now? Nope, still not me! But I did feel a sense of personal and company pride on the day this was introduced to Forbes.com readers.