Paul Humphrey

The collaboration will combine BMLL’s historical Level 1, 2 and 3 data with Quanthouse’s real-time service in a bid to allow hedge funds and asset managers to better understand market behaviours and test their investment strategies.

This will help them to achieve alpha “more predictably”, BMLL chief executive Paul Humphrey told The TRADE.

“Making QuantHouse’s real-time and BMLL’s historical data available at the same time is a game-changer because it removes costly and complex data engineering requirements,” he explained.

“Buy-side firms are now able to accelerate time to insights and time to market, helping them maintain a competitive advantage. This partnership delivers the buy-side with both historical and real-time data sets to help them understand how markets truly behave.”

The pair went through a process of “data symbology” prior to announcing their partnership. All data is now harmonised and available in one format across all venues and asset classes, in order to better allow firms to analyse real-time data and historical data simultaneously.

“What we are witnessing across the industry is a rising demand for high-quality datasets to carry out research, understand liquidity dynamics and make better-informed trading decisions,” added Humphrey.

“The challenge is that the data engineering required to harmonise data sets from across different venues and asset classes is often cost-prohibitive. What buy-side firms need is high-quality, granular data, delivered in a harmonised, ready-to-use format.”

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Level 3 equities data from the National Stock Exchange of India (NSE India) dating back to January 2021 and Level 2 data from the Bombay Stock Exchange dating back across the same period will now be available to BMLL clients via its Data Lab.

Paul Humphrey

The move comes as part of a continued expansion by BMLL, which has added several new regions to its offering in the last year.

India data, BMLL chief executive Paul Humphrey tells The TRADE, is in particular demand from US clients thanks to demand for trading in the region.

Read more – BMLL brings Level 3 analytics to South African capital markets

“Many customers that we speak to find getting access to quality data in those markets problematic so we will have both venues at full depth in one harmonised format in our environment which we think will be somewhat unique,” he explained.

“When our team have been on the road show with our clients, one of the popular questions we get in the US is when are you adding India? They like trading there.”

Asia-Pacific has been of particular focus to BMLL as of late. Most recent in the data provider’s additions to its universe was the inclusion of China trading data in December last year. BMLL now offers a range of Level 2 or Level 3 data across the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Shanghai Stock Exchange and Shenzhen Stock Exchange.

“We said it [China trading data] was unique and six months into it, clients are using that data that they can’t get anywhere else in that format,” said Humphrey. “There is a route where members can go directly to the exchange together for depth of course but that’s in raw format and that requires heavy lifting that really only a handful of firms in the world can actually perform.”

Read more – BMLL completes China equity data offering with the addition of Shanghai data

The firm now offers data across venues in Europe, North America, South Africa and Asia Pacific including China, India, Singapore, Australia, and Japan.

BMLL buys the historic data in raw format from the source and then goes through the process of harmonising it on behalf of its clients.

“Our clients can see in the raw format so they know that we haven’t lost any of the data attributes, but we also present it in a consistent and normalised way without losing any of its attributes,” added Humphrey. “I continue to read comments about data reliability and consistency and that cleaning data almost certainly results in the degradation of data quality.”

“We buy our historic data from source – that’s a starting point direct from the matching engine or partner collects it for us. The less you start from this point, the less you can you hope to provide historical data with only minimal errors. We preserve all the row fields from the original data but we also have a normalised layer for managing trade condition codes, market states across multiple markets and regions.”

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Back in 2020, we said the race for speed was over, and the global race for quality data and analytics was on. We see this continuing, and the industry-wide lack of quant resources – critical for researching, analysing and understanding market behaviour – adds both complexity and urgency to this race. The quest for quality historical market data, without gaps and spikes, will intensify. The market has been dominated by real-time firms whose historical product is little more than their exhaust! If historical content is driving decision-making, then quality becomes the most important aspect, whatever your firm’s level of sophistication.

Market participants need global data-driven content to enhance their own products and gain deeper understanding of market shifts and liquidity dynamics, and to identify opportunities for better trading outcomes. Crucially, they need their data to be ready for use without the burden of data engineering and infrastructure on their P&L. We expect an acceleration in firms moving away from heavily investing in aggregating, owning, storing and engineering these data sets, time and time again when high-quality, curated and maintained historical data and analytics are available for all. Market participants will differentiate themselves by what they do with data, not by owning it! 

Ray Tierney, president of Broadridge Trading and Connectivity Solutions (BTCS) 

Data driven thinking and the integration of digital technology will reshape industries and propel companies forward heading into 2024. As data driven and digital technologies continue to become more integrated into the market, managers at all levels need to keep these factors in mind when they develop strategies, allocate resources and set goals.

The combination of data driven thinking and the integration of digital technology necessitates a cultural change. It starts at the top and requires organisations to continually challenge the status quo, experiment, and get comfortable with failure. Organisations must rethink old operating models and test new ones to become more agile in their ability to respond to customers and rivals. The overarching trend is a shift that prioritises data and analytics, automation, and AI-assisted technologies that will fundamentally change how organisations operate and deliver value to customers.

Michelle Tran, president, TMX Datalinx

Demand for high-quality and differentiated data products will intensify in 2024. High interest rates, trading volume volatility and the overall uncertainty that impacted markets in 2023 and led to widespread corporate cost-cutting are likely to continue into 2024. As a result, investment firms will employ a more stringent vetting process as they evaluate their data needs. There will be a focus on reliable and proven data sets that both optimise returns while reducing risk, and that are applicable to portfolios across many asset types and multiple geographies.

We anticipate equity and options traders will lean into quality core data sets such as forward-looking corporate events data, and robust alternative data sets around ESG and private assets. On the fixed income front, the rates transition happening globally will lead market participants to look for benchmarks that streamline the transition to new reference rates. Information businesses will need to tightly align their data strategy with these client needs. This means having a diversified data strategy that includes investment, innovation, expansion, partnerships and acquisitions, to ensure that we continue to support our clients’ entire investment lifecycle needs.

Karen Geiger, co-general manager, SS&C Wealth & Investment Technologies

The key to navigating 2024 will be access to data you can trust. There will be an intense focus on connecting the front- and back-office through modern technology. Enabling real-time data access across the firm is the goal. The increased demand for real-time data comes from two ongoing trends: regulation and asset class diversification. Preparing for T+1 is a priority for all market participants. To prepare, firms will need access to the data even faster than today. Ahead of the May 2024 deadline, more are tapping outsourced specialists for help.

You will also continue to see a push to modernise the loan market, whether through digitised loan data or electronic trading. As firms continue to diversify into this high-yield asset class, there will be a desire to create efficiencies and automate paper-based, manual market processes. Machine learning can help alleviate operational headaches and accelerate processing and settlement times.

Every asset manager is looking to rationalise its technology footprint and spend. The aim in 2024 isn’t merely tech consolidation for consolidation’s sake, it’s about collapsing silos and creating a connected investing experience. Firms will be looking for interoperable solutions with seamless and automated access to real-time data to make fast and informed investment decisions.

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Next up in our introduction to the distinguished nominees for the Leaders in Trading 2023 Editors’ Choice Awards, we bring you the shortlist for the Outstanding Market Data Provider category, shining a light on those displaying recent excellence in the data sphere.

Over the last year, the market has been increasingly turning its attention to data quality and accessibility, with providers continually enhancing their offerings for clients through technological developments, new partnerships and significant investment.

Among the key players in this competitive landscape, The TRADE has selected big xyt, BMLL Technologies, Neptune Networks, and TP ICAP, Parameta Solutions for the 2023 shortlist, following various individual achievements by these vendors over the past year. 

big xyt

Market data provider big xyt has had a stellar year. Among its recent moves was the unveiling of its real-time analytics offering in October in which it leverages its own proprietary European tape. The turnkey solution provides trading firms, exchanges, dealing desks and issuers with enhanced post-trade metrics, as well as pre-trade support. The ‘first-to-market’ service is focused on a high quality, consistent and normalised dataset of European trades and EBBO benchmark prices.

In July, big xyt and the Johannesburg Stock Exchange launched a joint venture, named big xyt ecosystems, to offer data analytics to global trading venues. It offers the Trade Explorer data platform, recently launched in South Africa, to financial centres globally, offering analytics tools which allow users to understand market liquidity and flows, market share, business concentration and execution performance, alongside delivering tools for analysing trading patterns and for pre-trade decision support. Prior to this, in May, big xyt launched a new trade verification tool – an extension of its Open TCA solution – to improve ETF execution, with the move having come in response to the pre-hedging debate. It is focused on execution analytics at both the pre- and post-trade stage, with users able to submit any trade or order for the analytics returning the verification of orderbook characteristics, price reversion and execution performance instantaneously.

With Europe as its key market, big xyt has also continued to expand globally, onboarding and upgrading a number of clients. Through these relationships, the business has worked hand in hand to offer some of its clients’ functionalities through its own product suite for use by other users. A key characteristic of the independent business is its autonomy – to date the provider has not received any external investment, maintaining its stance as an entity with zero change of conflict of interest. 

BMLL Technologies

BMLL has gone from strength to strength in recent months following its Series B Funding in October 2022, raising $26 million from Nasdaq Ventures, FactSet and IQ Capital’s Growth Fund. Following this, in September of this year, Snowflake Ventures joined the Series B investment round as BMLL entered into a partnership with Snowflake. The business provides its clients – banks, brokers, asset managers, hedge funds, global exchange groups, academic institutions and regulators – immediate and flexible access to Level 3, harmonised, T+1 historical order book data and advanced pre- and post-trade analytics at scale.

The provider has continued to expand through partnerships and launches, with Magma Capital Funds; Aquis Exchange; SIX Group; Jefferies; Berenberg; FactSet; Bank of England; Financial Conduct Authority; NYU’s Quant Team; and Kepler Cheuvreux as the latest additions to its client roster. In September, trading infrastructure provider Exegy entered into an introducer partnership with BMLL Technologies to help free up time spent on data analysis, allowing for algos to be enhanced and for clients to derive alpha. BMLL has continually stressed the importance of global coverage in today’s markets and recently added Aquis data for listed companies, data from FINRA US, Cboe Global Markets Japan and CBOE Australia, the Australian Stock Exchange, Japannext Co., SGX Group, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE), and Hong Kong Stock Exchange (XHKG), as well as expanding its equities and ETF data offering to include Shenzhen Stock Exchange data.

Through recent investments BMLL has been able to expand geographically, as well enhance its data coverage and grow the team. Over the last 12 months, the team has grown by 35% in areas including: engineering, technology, sales and marketing. Recent people moves include industry veteran Rob Laible appointed as head of Americas, Jenny Chen as head of sales, Americas, and Tom Jardine as customer-facing data scientist, Americas.

Neptune Networks

Neptune has made several strides and seen significant growth in the last 12 months, working to enhance liquidity in global markets. It provides axes from top global fixed income dealers to various buy-side firms, supplying the highest quality bond pre-trade data from the sell-side via FIX. Neptune data is delivered via several workflow options, including direct to OMS and/or EMS, or via a number of APIs, covering various asset classes, including: credit, emerging markets, rates and Munis. Its network provides data from 32 global dealers via one connection and in the last 12 months, the business has developed its buy-side client remit, with more than 90 firms live on the platform, managing over $60 trillion in global assets under management.

In June, Mizuho EMEA joined the Neptune network as axe dealer for bonds, set to distribute axes for investment grade and high yield corporate credit. The following month, fixed income axe provision platform, Neptune Networks, added Lloyds Bank Corporate & Institutional Banking to its bond dealer community. Following the addition, Lloyds Bank confirmed that it would distribute axes of GBP and EUR investment grade and high yield corporate credit as well as UK gilt through Neptune. Other recent additions include Santander and Lombard Odier. Through this move, Lombard Odier has access to Neptune’s axes across rates, investment grade, high yield and emerging markets bonds. 

TP ICAP, Parameta Solutions 

Parameta Solutions is TP ICAP’s data and analytics division and provides a range of services for the market: OTC market data, benchmarks and indices, risk solutions, and regulatory solutions. In the last year its data offering has developed through product launches and updates in different areas. As of August 2023, Parameta Solutions’ revenue had increased 5% to £91 million, with an overall uplift in margin and profitability. The firm provides users with pre- and post-trade analytics, as well as unbiased OTC content and proprietary data, price discovery insights, and risk management services. Its offering also includes benchmark and indices, and the business was recently recognised as an EU benchmark administrator by ESMA, becoming the first inter-dealer broker to administer OTC benchmarks and indices across both Europe and the UK. The post-trade offering helps users control their counterparty and regulatory risks. The tools manage balance-sheet exposure and also provide compression and optimisation services.

In August 2022, the firm joined forces with PeerNova to launch ClearConsensus, a transparent high-fidelity consensus network for independent price valuation (IPV). A year on, in August this year, TP ICAP, Parameta Solutions launched a new family of interest rate volatility (IRSV) indices in a bid to provide robust and transparent daily indices in interest rates swap markets. IRSV indices, built on a theoretical foundation when measuring interest rate swap volatility, allows for a model-free measure of spot implied volatility for market participants.

The business is focused on the consolidation of Parameta Solutions companies – which is well-progressed according to the business – in a bid to develop more partnerships with third-party data providers, with a confirmed investment planned for the expansion of the business. In addition, Parameta Solutions is working in conjunction with global analytics firm Numerix to build independent fair valuation of OTC derivatives – set to launch a new valuation product in H1 2024, adding to the risk management solutions.

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Ed Wicks, global head of trading, Legal & General Investment Management

Mike Carrodus, CEO, Substantive Research: In 2023, tipping points will be hit across investment research and data. The recently announced Bernstein/SG deal indicates the direction of travel in research, where even premium research products and services become part of wider platforms with multiple revenue streams. Mifid II arguably removed a great deal of “nice to have” research from the market, but the danger now is the loss of quality and differentiated inputs at greater pace.

If providers choose to survive by being acquired, then research consumers need to understand what this M&A means for quality and independence. In market data we will see the opposite situation – continued cost inflation at a provider and product level, and a group of consuming firms struggling to control budgets and understand how their agreements compare to the wider market. The FCA’s Wholesale Market Data Study will finish by the end of the year, with the accompanying focus on the competitive landscape and the opacity of pricing and licensing models. Buy- and sell-side firms will also take it upon themselves to understand their data consumption more holistically and make concerted efforts to encourage greater competition and transparency wherever possible, regardless of how the regulatory situation plays out. 

Matt Barrett, CEO at Adaptive Financial Consulting: Firstly, there will be increased investment in technology across financial services and capital markets participants. In response to the opportunities created by the big tech firms stumbles, depressed valuations, and lay-offs, the use of technology to differentiate will be back as a board room topic in 2023. Secondly, cloud resilience will be high on the agenda. With financial institutions accelerating cloud adoption, rapidly moving their core infrastructure onto the cloud to save cost, enhance their ability to scale and improve access to data insights and analytics, an issue that will become increasingly top-of-mind is vulnerability to outages. As firms rely on cloud services, faults or drops in service can have a critical impact on businesses and traders that use them. Cloud resilience and high availability will therefore become a crucial topic – sophisticated trading firms need the assurance that their operations will remain consistent 24/7. Firms realise they cannot be beholden to third party outages – fault tolerant architecture and technologies will therefore become an increasingly central consideration for firms looking to build their own trading technology stack to differentiate.  

Paul Humphrey, CEO, BMLL Technologies: The race for high-quality historical data will step up in 2023 as firms look for deeper insight across the trade lifecycle. Now firms must capture the power of granular historical data to gain an edge and are more aware of what capabilities they need to implement at every stage to achieve this. Quant teams are using third party data science platforms as the foundation upon which to build research. Traders are demanding analytics that contextualise real-time activity against historical averages. Sophisticated firms are combining public and private cloud to maximise the benefit of high-quality data within their own environments at a fraction of the cost of running complex market data pipelines themselves.

All of this is predicated on high-quality data from firms who specialise in historical data, not simply as a by-product of their real-time business but built using dedicated Level 3 engineering processes as the core value proposition they bring to the market. Demand for market data derived from the most granular data available will only grow as the need for competitive edge, and correlating sophistication levels, rise. Firms that realise the predictive power of Level 3 data will understand their markets better, derive more predictive analytics, and leave those still using lower-quality data behind. 

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FactSet and BMLL’s initial offering will include Market by Price Level 2 Tick History, which aims to resolve data quality challenges associated with current industry Level 2 offerings.

The new offering builds upon BMLL’s historical Level 3 data engineering capabilities, allowing FactSet to bring an improved Level 2 product to market, providing clients with deep market insights and real-time data.

BMLL’s cloud-native data and analytics will provide the depth of venue coverage needed by FactSet’s clients across a range of use cases including quant research, back test, best execution, transaction cost analysis, compliance, surveillance and risk.

The collaboration comes as part of FactSet’s strategy to provide cloud solutions that help clients improve and modernise their market data technology, as well as expanding the firm’s real-time data and tick history capabilities.

FactSet’s joint solution with BMLL will allow clients to access Level 2 Data on a common delivery platform which FactSet claims will accelerate research, optimise workflow and trading strategies, and generate alpha.

“BMLL is a specialist provider of historic Level 3 Data. Our unique industry-leading normalisation and harmonisation processes, capturing every message at nanosecond precision timestamps, enable us to deliver the cleanest market data available anywhere in capital markets,” said Paul Humphrey, chief executive of BMLL.

The move follows BMLL’s latest $26 million Series B funding round, which was co-led by FactSet, among others, to provide market participants with the ability to make more informed investment decisions by accessing improved data and analytics.

“Through our collaboration and investment in BMLL, FactSet is empowering a broader set of clients and democratising access to rich insights derived from the full depth of historic order book data, which was previously only available to those with dedicated infrastructure and in-house capabilities to curate this level of data and analytics,” said Jonathan Reeve, EVP, head of content and technology solutions at FactSet.

“We share a common vision with BMLL and look forward to delivering a differentiated advantage to our clients by leveraging the full power of Level 3 granular tick data.”

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big xyt

big xyt provides independent smart data and analytics solutions to the global trading and investment community. The market data provider allows firms to process and normalise large data sets on demand and in real time, allowing execution performance to be analysed, compliance with regulatory standards, and to reduce the complexity and costs of technology and operational requirements.

big xyt’s security analytics solution, Liquidity Cockpit, helped position the firm as an independent reference for equity market structure, alongside serving as a building block for more accurate benchmarking of global execution strategies. In addition, Open TCA, which is used for execution analytics, is redefining independent analysis with optimal flexibility for the user, according to big xyt. The firm provides actionable insights for complex markets, while providing flexibility for data scientists and clarity for decision makers.

Over the past year, big xyt has partnered with a number of firms to improve market data access. In November last year, big xyt and ETFbook partnered to improve transparency in European ETF/Ps. The partnership looked to make it easier to identify available products across any segment or exposure. In February, big xyt partnered with Cambridge University to launch a Global Exchanges Directory to centralise key information on major exchanges into a single portal for easy reference.

Elsewhere, Cowen Execution Services integrated big xyt data to drive European equities trading growth. The integration offers additional market structure visibility and provides clients with access to liquidity opportunities, Cowen said.

BMLL

BMLL Technologies is a provider of harmonised, Level 3 historical data and analytics to the world’s capital markets participants. The firm offers banks, brokers, asset managers, hedge funds, global exchange groups and academic institutions immediate and flexible access to the most granular Level 3, T+1 order book data and advanced analytics, in a harmonised format.

Over the last 14 months, the company claims to have doubled  its revenue alongside adding Tier 1 clients including investment banks, exchanges, buy-side firms and regulators. In March, BMLL expanded geographically, with Tim Baker appointed as senior adviser, responsible for growing the firm’s US client base, and developing and implementing the company’s growth strategy in the region.

In November 2021, BMLL expanded into futures, offering full-depth Level 3 futures order book data from CME, Eurex and ICE in one harmonised format. Full-depth order book data covers equity indices, fixed income, short-term interest rates, commodities, cryptocurrencies and FX.

Elsewhere, BMLL introduced the Exchange Market Participant Analytics (EMPA) service in November last year – a managed service for exchanges to better analyse and understand their market participants. The service allows exchanges to analyse and report on granular executions per liquidity provider to benchmark and report activity. 

In February, BMLL also became one of the founding members of the Sustainable Trading initiative, a membership network set up by industry veteran, Duncan Higgins, to drive positive change in the financial markets trading industry by helping firms improve the ESG performance of their trading businesses.

Bloomberg

Bloomberg’s market data feed generates value from data across the enterprise. A consolidated feed from 35 million instruments provides normalised data, enhancing analysis and decisions from front-office to operations. Bloomberg offers flexible delivery options including cloud and API, and with timely accurate data, enterprises are able to capture opportunities, evaluate risk and ensure compliance in fast-moving markets.

The Bloomberg Market Data Feed (B-PIPE) offers global connectivity to consolidated, normalised market data in real time. B-PIPE, which was built for the front-office, provides coverage of all the same asset classes as the Bloomberg Terminal.

Over the past year, Bloomberg has collaborated with a range of companies to offer improved market data access. In March, Bloomberg launched real-time data access on Google cloud. The Google cloud collaboration gives both front and back-office professionals access to Bloomberg’s tick-for-tick data and real-time analytics services.

In July, GAM Investments integrated a suite of solutions from Bloomberg in a bid to simplify its risk and portfolio management capabilities. The asset manager will use the suite of buy-side solutions to manage market risk exposure and liquidity and investment risk.

In June, Bloomberg revealed plans to launch new set of tradable trackers based on its own indices. Tradeable Trackers, the new indices set to launch in Q4, are expected to deepen liquidity and improve intraday price transparency.

FactSet

FactSet offers data solutions that powers users’ investment workflows with hundreds of fundamental and alternative datasets backed by advanced data connectivity. FactSet offers over 40 years of data collection, integration, and management behind clients’ investment strategy and leverages open technology and flexible delivery options to maximise the value of clients’ data. The firm allows users to monitor global markets, research public and private companies, and gain industry-level insight with multi-asset class coverage, governance, and linking of financials, estimates, debt, ESG, news and research, and more.

In December last year, FactSet snapped up CUSIP as S&P Global ended its more than 50-year relationship with the company. As part of the acquisition, ‘Gold standard’ for securities identifiers, CUSIP became part of FactSet Content and Technology Solutions.

On the EMS side, FactSet has partnered with a couple of firms over the past year. BlackRock continued its Aladdin expansion with FactSet EMS integration in February this year. The multi-year partnership sees mutual clients of FactSet’s EMS and BlackRock’s flagship platform optimise trading workflows through a turnkey solution. Elsewhere, FactSet expanded its asset class offering with new fixed income trading capabilities. The offering on FactSet’s Portware trading solution allows clients to trade efficiently across more asset classes.

In July, State Street streamlined data flows through a partnership with FactSet. The collaboration promised an improved experience from client portals for equity, fixed income and multi-asset strategies.

Parameta Solutions, TP ICAP

Last year, Interdealer broker TP ICAP rebranded its data and analytics division and combined it with the post-trade business under one umbrella. Operating as Parameta Solutions, the new division includes TP ICAP’s data and analytics products and solutions with post-trade services. 

Parameta Solutions, TP ICAP offers OTC market data, from pre- to post-trade, which helps clients manage complex markets more effectively. The firm’s global platform offers clients access to scarce and valuable OTC market data and information-led products.

Parameta Solutions draws data from brands in the industry, including Tullett Prebon, ICAP and PVM, and covers all major asset classes.TP ICAP’s portfolio of brands offers deep liquidity pools and the firm’s pricing sources, technology infrastructure and delivery options help clients address their challenges. In addition, the company supports clients in meeting regulatory requirements, managing risk, improving operational efficiency and implementing new technology.

In August, Parameta Solutions partnered with PeerNova to launch a consensus network for independent price valuation. The two firms claimed that the service improves both business resilience and regulatory response by addressing the evolving risk environments for price valuation and control groups at banks globally.

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Access to data is getting easier, but access to alpha-generating insight will remain a priority for market participants in 2022. As the volume and types of data available to market participants continues to grow, so do the challenges of analysing huge, complex and highly interconnected data sets.  Over the last 12 months, we have seen increasing demand for Level 3 equities data and analytics tools from capital markets participants looking to generate alpha more predictably and gain an edge. 

It’s not only in equities where traders will be seeking an edge. We’ve seen great demand for our Level 3 data sets across futures asset classes, including equity futures, fixed income, short-term interest rates, commodities, cryptocurrencies and even FX. To use them effectively requires scalable compute capability and harmonisation – allowing quants to spend less time gathering, organising and cleaning data, and more time deriving predictive insights. When you understand the predictive power of Level 3 data, you understand the future was created yesterday!

Digitisation is starting to affect even the world of market data distribution. 2022 will present numerous opportunities for all participants in the data supply chain to contribute to much needed transparency and automation improvements. This is long overdue, given that while the eminence of data goes undisputed, in reality the complexity of global markets has outgrown the methods designed to support market data administration.

Business processes that have traditionally depended on human interpretation will potentially be automated, if all industry participants look for the big picture. This automation of market data can help drive efficiencies in financial markets, reduce costs and administrative burdens and, ultimately, allow all participants in the data supply chain to focus more on high-value activities.

We see demand for high-frequency data continuing to rise in 2022 amongst economists and analysts, as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic continues to make more traditional, periodic measures of macroeconomic activity insufficient in understanding global markets.  In addition, we believe that the immediacy with which information is updated and analysed, and the potential for ongoing travel restrictions, mean that collaboration tools, such as our recently launched Macrobond Viewer, will be more important in helping teams stay in touch and work efficiently with the latest information.  The transition to remote or hybrid working and analysing high-frequency data points has now happened, and even as we hope for a world without COVID-19, we feel that returning to using only traditional measures of macroeconomic activity such as GDP figures and quarterly employment numbers is unlikely. The future of macroeconomic measurement and prediction is more and better high-frequency data.

The next year will continue to see an explosion in the types of data available to the market. Traders, quants, regulators and researchers have access to an ever-growing choice of complex data and analytics but are faced with the real challenge of how to use them effectively to drive performance. Flexibility will be crucial for users to get the data they need, the way they want it. Some will want data delivered via full platform solutions and others to pull data only as necessary through APIs. Some will want simple raw data, and others complete sets of analytics.  Continued development of cloud capabilities and greater acceptance of open architectures will drive more collaboration – and help the buy-side and sell-side take full advantage of the expanded possibilities over the coming year.

We believe data and the implementation of a consolidated tape (CT) for equities and bonds will be one of the main focus globally in 2022. The European Commission (EC) recently released a proposal for a CT and officially recommended FIX’s Market Model Typology (MMT) to be mandated as a standard. Having access to effective, reliable and contextualised data has never been a more critical factor and establishing a CT will remain an ongoing and massive effort. Industry participants should be a part of the conversation to ensure its success, and we invite them to get involved in FIX’s working groups to help us create good effective data and bring to life a CT in equities and bonds.

Consolidated tape (CT) reforms will finally take shape in 2022 with the UK and EU adopting legislation for the provision of a tape and the mitigation of market data access and contribution issues. The role of a CT will morph from responsibilities to consolidate data, to a facilitator of the data contributions which will be mandated and in need of operational management. Consolidation itself will be conducted by the industry through existing infrastructure. Cloud technology will feature heavily in the consolidated tape. In the US, the plan to enable competing consolidators will likely be postponed further but the governance reforms will be adopted as a means of addressing inherent conflicts and independent representation and voting for tape users and end investor advocates.

The post The TRADE predictions series 2022: data appeared first on The TRADE.

The new product, BMLL Level 3 Futures Data, aims to minimise the time institutions spend gathering and filtering futures data by packaging.

The remit of the packages covers the major futures asset classes, including futures on equity indices, government bonds, short-term interest rates, commodities, digital assets, and FX.

The FinTech said futures datasets were often complex and large and when traded on a single venue often have interconnecting contracts on other exchanges, which means that gaining any meaningful insights from them is often time consuming and involves “significant computational workloads”.

By using the new data packages available in a computable environment, brokers, asset managers, hedge funds, BMLL said Future Commission Merchants, and Independent Software Vendors can focus their time on finding alpha generating strategies using the data instead.

“The sheer size of the futures market requires a scalable, cloud-based platform that can provide the insight and analytics needed for the ever-increasing data demands of market participants,” said Dr Elliot Banks, chief product officer at BMLL Technologies.

“Our customers, regardless of size, can leverage the BMLL Data Lab to run analyses on specific futures packages. With our harmonised data and the BMLL Data Lab, they can now look at multiple years of trading history on CME, Eurex and ICE in a consistent format, and they can quickly and easily test strategies.”

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BMLL’s Data Feed is pre-computed from Level 3 order book data and offers users insights across market quality, execution performance and available liquidity at different depths of the book.

Users can gain better insights on market behaviour and make more informed decisions to enhance their trading performance through access to BMLL’s pricing data within the FlexTRADER EMS blotter, delivered via API into FlexTRADER workflows.

“This partnership will provide our clients with more transparency – giving traders more choice at the right price point,” said Andy Mahoney, managing director, EMEA FlexTrade Systems.

“This means our clients will have more enriched pre- and post-trade analytics inside our FlexTRADER EMS blotter, helping them to analyse historical data to mate the best trading decisions by comparing analytics across the watch list and determine when to trade or spot any outliers.”

This is the second integration initiative by FlexTrade this year so far, after it integrated its EMS with heavyweight asset manager BlackRock’s Aladdin platform in May, to enhance its existing order and execution capabilities.

Through the integration of Aladdin and FlexTrade’s EMS, the combined platform provides mutual clients with a cross-asset system for the entire trading lifecycle.

“We are thrilled to partner with FlexTrade to make our historical data and analytics available to some of the world’s largest asset managers. Making sense of how the markets behave and having the tools to analyse long term cycles and trends, or backtest trading strategies, are crucial for all market participants looking to maintain a competitive edge,” said Paul Humphrey, CEO, BMLL.

“Our Level 3 T+1 data and scalable analytics capabilities complement FlexTRADER’s technology, helping firms navigate market complexity and make more informed trading decisions.”

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