Options Technology, a provider of cloud-enabled trading infrastructure, has launched two new products that leverage Code Willing’s Options Data Store and Quantify offerings. The launch stems from Options’ partnership with financial data management specialists Code Willing last year.
Options Data Store enables users to ‘try and buy’ ready-to-use datasets via a user-friendly GUI, without having to source and store large datasets. The Options Data Store datasets are accompanied by relevant information and research.
“A key aspect of Options Data Store is that it allows clients to upload their own data sets alongside both our real-time and historical market data and the alternative datasets that we’re licensed to redistribute. This could be proprietary data that they generate themselves or it may be data from other data providers,” says Micah Kroeze, SVP Product Management at Options, adding “we associate every piece of data with a global security identifier, which makes it extremely easy for the client to run analytics on that data, because they can directly associate alternative datasets with the underlying markets that they want to trade.”
Users can launch their selected datasets directly within Quantify, which layers a fully auditable, high-performance, self-service compute environment on top of Options Data Store, or from web-based applications such as Jupyter Notebook. Key features of Quantify include granular file system-level data entitlements and built-in audit and budgeting toolsets. The solution also offers multi-cloud capabilities, with the ability to directly route jobs to the lowest-cost or most efficient environment, based on available capacity.
“Quantify is more than just an analytics platform, it’s an on-demand analytics environment,” says Kroeze. “Think of it as a sandbox as a service – you can spin up as much compute and storage as you need, with the enterprise controls around data permissioning, entitlements, and compliance functions built in from the ground up.”
Kroeze cites three example use cases for the Quantify product. “The first is for early-stage proprietary or quant trading firms, who don’t necessarily have many years’ worth of data, or the tools necessary to rapidly develop their trading strategies. Quantify can dramatically shorten the time it takes for those trading firms to get off the ground. Another use case where we’ve seen a lot of interest is from similar firms who are more established and able to do these things themselves, but don’t necessarily want to, because it takes a lot of time and effort to maintain all the data, the appropriate reporting, the licensing and so on. There’s a lot of value for these firms in using a managed service for the nuts and bolts of data, analytics and infrastructure management, as opposed to doing it themselves.”
Kroeze says that they are also seeing interest from larger firms, such as banks, where data compliance becomes a complex problem to solve. “Effectively, we’re offering them a data management platform as-a-service. Having the entitlements permissioning and reporting built-in and managed, makes their lives much easier in that regard.
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