Man Group, the technology-empowered global investment firm, has signed a multi-year open-source technology development and product integration agreement with Bloomberg, the financial information company, to build upon Man’s DataFrame database product, ArcticDB, and to integrate it into BQuant Bloomberg’s open source analytics platform.
ArcticDB is a high-performance Python-native database, built in response to the challenges that many large buy-side and sell-side institutions face around the ever-increasing amount of data and complexity of front-office research.
By integrating ArcticDB into Bloomberg’s BQuant open -ource analytics platform, quantitative analysts and data scientists in the financial markets sector will be able to quickly build, test, and deploy models for alpha generation, risk, and trading, using high volume timeseries data from Bloomberg’s comprehensive range of datasets, as well as their own firm’s own internal data. The BQuant environment, which combines Bloomberg data, services, and tools with open-source technology such as Python and Jupyter notebooks, is fully integrated with the Bloomberg Terminal.
Commenting on the partnership, Gary Collier, CTO of Man Group Alpha Technology, said: “Today’s tools are simply not built to address the challenges of real-world data science. Datasets are massive, complex and time-varying. However, regardless of their original form, DataFrames quickly emerge as the unit of analysis in modern data science workflows and ArcticDB makes this a first-class concern. By streamlining how we work, ArcticDB enhances our ability to generate new trading strategies, optimise portfolios, and manage investment risk. These are all features that we expect Bloomberg users will appreciate too.”
Mark Jones, Deputy CEO at Man Group, added: “Technology is part of our DNA; we’re using our 35 years of quant investing and technology experience to improve performance and efficiency across alpha generation, trading and execution, and risk management. ArcticDB has transformed the way we handle data, and we’re confident it will do the same for others.”
ArcticDB deals with individual data elements spanning hundreds of millions of rows, or hundreds of thousands of columns, powering use cases such as deep tick history analysis or modelling of large corporate bond universes. The first iteration of ArcticDB was made available on an open-source basis via GitHub and has seen over one million downloads since 2015. The latest version, which retains the same Python-friendly API backed by a new C++ engine, continues an open-source approach and adds a commercial proposition through an enterprise version for production use.
Shawn Edwards, CTO of Bloomberg, commented: “We’re excited to collaborate with Man Group to further develop the open source ArcticDB project and to enhance our customers’ experience using the BQuant platform by integrating its capabilities. This will give Bloomberg’s quantitative clients the ability to process, analyze, and backtest using billions of rows of timeseries data in seconds as they seek new ways to generate alpha. In addition, this effort further reinforces Bloomberg’s ‘open source first’ philosophy, in which our engineers both use and contribute to the broader open-source ecosystem.”
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