Financial Market Data Web Services – Xignite Blog

If you’d like to know what financial market data web services and mashups can really do for you in plain English, then check out the latest NetworkWorld interview with the expert (our CEO Stephane!).

Click on the image above to go to the NetworkWorld podcast.

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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.

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One of the toughest things to explain about what we do… is what we actually do…because it can be really obscure and difficult to communicate to non-developers. After giving all the marketing-speak of how we lower TCO, get rid of IT headaches etc, a lot of people come back with “Uh, yeah, but what do you actually DO?”

So, we’ve been working hard to create some pictures that simply, yet accurately describe what we do, and so far this is what we have come up with.

What are financial Web services or Cloud services?

The idea for this picture is that we help companies do the following:

• come to our website, sign up, try and buy our Web services on-demand like Salesforce.com
• since it’s all over the Web, there is no in-house software etc. requried
• get your data by the song (service) instead of a CD (feed) like iTunes
• to make it easier to build financial apps and websites

(Note: for the lawyers, the trademarks above remain the property of their respective owners)

Then, just when we think we’ve done it, they ask: “So, what is this Splice mashup community thingy then?”  This is the picture we came up with for this question…

Splice Web services on-demand community mashup platform

We’re still working on this one, so any help is appreciated.

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XigniteMoneyMarketsDemand for real-time interest rate information has never been stronger. We recently launched XigniteMoneyMarkets as a comprehensive source of real-time US Treasury and real-time global swap rate information for more than 24 currencies. For a demo of all available rates, check here.

Web Service EnhancementsWe constantly enhance existing services by adding new operations or data sets to existing services. Here is a quick rundown of some enhancements for the last few months:

• Addition of real-time Currency Forward Rates to XigniteCurrencies.
• Addition of historical cross bid-ask information to XigniteCurrencies.
• Addition of real-time and historical currency converters to XigniteCurrencies.
• Addition of currency reports to XigniteCurrencies.
• Addition of Canadian NewsWire (CNW) to XigniteReleases.
• Addition of new data points to XigniteFundamentals including StateOfIncorporation, TotalDebt, TotalCash, TotalAssets, TotalLiabilities, NetIncome, TotalRevenue, TotalExpenses, TotalOperatingExpenses, OperatingIncome, StateOfIncorporation, SECName, LastAnnualReport, LastQuarterly, LastProxyStatement, IRSNumber,

Don’t hesitate to contact us if youn eed new operations or new data to increase the value you get from our web services. We pride ourselves in being able to respond to our clients quickly and effectively.

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SOAP has had a little bit of bad rap lately. Some people think it is too complicated compared to its cousins REST and POX (plain old XML). The truth is that it all depends on the development environment you use. To prove our point, Xignite made this video that shows how you can integrate a web service in your application in less than 60 seconds and 3 lines of code. Watch it on YouTube:

Here is a higher quality Flash Version.

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