Financial Market Data Web Services – Xignite Blog

Algorithmic trading firms were put on notice last Monday when Commissioner Bart Chilton of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) said that high frequency trading (HFT) and algorithmic trading firms should be made legally responsible for maintaining a minimum set of testing and monitoring standards to prevent future flash crashes.

The possibility that algorithmic trading firms may need to support new regulatory requirements highlights the rapidly growing importance of the market data cloud and new cloud services like NASDAQ Data-On-Demand for back testing purposes.

In a bid to resuscitate the heroes of 1980’s sitcoms, Mr. Chilton declared, “I want to be like MacGyver. Remember, he was always trying to prevent crime before it happened.” So if you’re a criminally culpable algorithmic trading firm, you’d best beware—especially if Mr. Chilton gets his hands on a paper clip and a stick of chewing gum. Household items aside, Mr. Chilton also plans to rely on tools such as a “kind of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.” He’d like algorithmic trading systems to be tested by either exchanges or regulators before going live. And after going live, he’d like algorithmic trading systems to be monitored on an on-going basis.

Read more

If you look at our new corporate bond master service, XigniteBondMaster, you’ll quickly see that you can use it to get information for over 125,000 U.S. corporate bonds, including issuer information, maturity dates, coupon rates and so on.  But you’re not likely to see one of the best features of the service until you roll up your sleeves and start digging around in the data:  the ability to look up official CUSIP identifiers with remarkable ease.

CUSIP identifiers are highly valued throughout the industry as the de facto standard for uniquely identifying over 9.1 million financial instruments.  And now you can easily look up CUSIPs for thousands of corporate bonds using XigniteBondMaster.  Interested in a particular issue, but not sure what its CUSIP is?  Try looking it up by the bond issuer!  Or just look it up by bond name.

All CUSIP data comes from CUSIP Global Services, an organization managed by Standard & Poor’s on behalf of the American Bankers Association specifically to oversee the official set of CUSIP identifiers.

You do need to have an agreement in place with CUSIP Global Services in order to receive CUSIP data, since this is highly valued data that must be licensed first.  But once you have an agreement in place, CUSIPs will automatically start appearing in your XigniteBondMaster outputs.

Now that the cat’s finally out of the bag on BGCantor’s new on-demand web services, I can finally take the readers of the Xignite blog back stage for a “behind the scenes” look at the making of the biggest initiative in the on-demand financial web services world since the start of Xignite.

BGCantor On-Demand offers fixed income and derivatives data via on-demand web services using Xignite’s core platform.

What happened behind the scenes?  How did this new on-demand business get launched?  And what did it take to launch it?  Well, first and foremost, it took a great team at BGCantor Market Data.  The BGCantor team was absolutely delightful to work with.  Everyone was highly knowledgeable, very responsive, dedicated to accomplishing the mission and very excited about the whole project.  We couldn’t have asked for a better group to work with.

Together, the BGCantor/Xignite team started by designing web services to be truly application-ready, combining Xignite’s web service experience with BGCantor’s in-depth market data knowledge.  Then we coded the web services on top of the XigniteOnDemand market data distribution platform for rapid development on a robust, high-performance, highly scalable architecture.  At the same time, we also built the BGCantor On-Demand website and tightly integrated it with the web services themselves.  To help manage the new on-demand business, we also deployed an administrative portal for on-going management of customer accounts.  At the same time, on the sales and marketing front, we worked together to find just the right usage-based pricing model to drive strong revenue growth for BGCantor while also delivering exceptional value for BGCantor’s customers.  Then we collaborated on developing marketing collateral and sales tools.

As for showing you blooper videos of our behind-the-scenes footage, I’m afraid I couldn’t quite convince Legal to sign off on that. Sorry. Maybe next time.