Managed connectivity and co-lo specialist MarketPrizm plans to introduce a hosted tick database of global exchange data in Q4 of this year, representing the latest vendor to offer tick data as a service to trading and investment firms looking to leverage it for algorithmic backtesting and quantitative analysis.
MarketPrizm’s service – available initially in its London data centre, and later at its Tokyo facility, will at first cover the past three months of historical data from the equities, commodities and derivatives exchanges that the company provides real-time data for.
Conceding that other vendors offer similar services, the company suggests the quality of its data is a differentiator – providing full order depth and records timestamped at the source co-location data centre. Such attributes are useful, in some cases essential, to quants and other trade algorithm builders in designing and testing strategies.
Among those that MartketPrizm will compete with are NYSE Technologies, with its 1010Data-powered Market Data Analytics Lab and TAQ offerings, Nasqaq OMX with its Market Replay Services (built on cloud technology from Xignite and Amazon Web Services), SpryWare’s HDS OnDemand, OneMarketData’s OneQuantData service, and Thomson Reuters’ Tick History Service (with two petabytes of data from as far back as 1996).
All of these services demonstrate the model of delivering big data content via a hosted/cloud environment, removing much complexity involved in data management and infrastructure operations. Combined with trading and investment applications also being hosted in a cloud environment, the architecture also overcomes the movement of large volumes of data via relatively slow and expensive wide area connectivity.
