About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Continuum Analytics Provides Python Insight into Thomson Reuters Databases

Subscribe to our newsletter

Continuum Analytics is providing access to Thomson Reuters’ QADirect data offering via Wakari, its browser-based Python data analytics platform. Python is an open source computer language that was first released in 1991, and which has grown in popularity in part because of its emphasis on code readability and compactness. A number of financial markets participants are known to be using or evaluating it.

QADirect comprises data spread across a number of databases, including Worldscope, Datastream and I/B/E/S, and is focused on the needs of quantitative research. It provides access to normalised data from different sources via a single identifer. It is typically deployed on a customer site with daily updates, and is hosted in a relational database, such as from Microsoft or Oracle. Access is via SQL or an analytics package, including SAS, S-Plus, Matlab or R, or via Thomson Reuters own QA Studio analytics interface.

Austin, Texas-based Continuum specialises in Python-related technology, for data management and analytics. Founded in 2011, Continuum is privately backed and earlier this year received $3 million if funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop visualisation techniques for large, multi-dimensional datasets. It released Wakari into beta in December 2012, providing an easy mechanism for developers to create data analytics using Python. Wakari includes IOPro, a library developed specifically to optimise access to large datasets, such as QADirect.

Says Continuum president Peter Wang, Python provides a simpler data access method than traditional SQL, reckoning that Python can do in one line of code what SQL takes five or six to acheive. It is also an easier programming language to read, compared to the likes of C, C++ and Java, he contends.

Wakari can either be installed within an enterprise or accessed as a managed service, in which case it relies on cloud EC2 (compute) and S3 (storage) infrastructure from Amazon Web Services. It also can leverage GPU-accelerated compute nodes. One of the strengths of Wakari, says Wang, is the ease of sharing analytics results, which can be acheived by sharing a single URL.

Python has clearly caught the interest of financial markets developers. More than 300 attended a recent New York Python in Finance conference, hosted by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, which featured speakers from Continuum, and addressed topics including visualisation, scalability, GPU support, and integration with the likes of R and Microsoft Excel.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: Enhancing trader efficiency with interoperability – Innovative solutions for automated and streamlined trader desktop and workflows

17 September 2025 10:00am ET | 3:00pm London | 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 Minutes Traders today are expected to navigate increasingly complex markets using workflows that often lag behind the pace of change. Disconnected systems, manual processes, and fragmented user experiences create hidden inefficiencies that directly impact performance and risk management. Firms that can streamline...

BLOG

A-Team Group Announces Winners of the 2025 TradingTech Insight Awards USA

A-Team Group is delighted to announce the winners of the 2025 TradingTech Insight Awards USA, recognising the leading providers of trading technology, infrastructure, and consultancy services for capital markets across North America. This year’s awards highlight the technology providers driving innovation and performance across the trading lifecycle, from market connectivity and execution management to analytics,...

EVENT

AI in Capital Markets Summit London

The AI in Capital Markets Summit will explore current and emerging trends in AI, the potential of Generative AI and LLMs and how AI can be applied for efficiencies and business value across a number of use cases, in the front and back office of financial institutions. The agenda will explore the risks and challenges of adopting AI and the foundational technologies and data management capabilities that underpin successful deployment.

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets: Practical Insight for a Transforming Industry – Free Handbook

AI is no longer on the horizon – it’s embedded in the infrastructure of modern capital markets. But separating real impact from inflated promises requires a grounded, practical understanding. The AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2025 provides exactly that. Designed for data-driven professionals across the trade life-cycle, compliance, infrastructure, and strategy, this handbook goes beyond...