Tech giants provide data boosts for all
THE last week has seen two important developments for those seeking market data, albeit on opposite ends of the spectrum. Yesterday saw the launch of Bloomberg Next. Bloomberg is constantly tuning and tweaking its terminals, but it decided that the latest changes were large enough to warrant a launch event. “The complexity and interconnectedness of the global financial marketplace has grown significantly. Business and financial professionals need to synthesise astounding amounts of information to make intelligent investment decisions,” said Tom Secunda, Bloomberg’s co-founder and vice chairman at the launch. “We have redesigned the terminal to ensure that our clients get the best, fastest and most insightful answers.” According to Bloomberg, Next is the result of a multi-year design process conducted by Bloomberg Research & Development, a team of more than 3,000 technologists. In addition, a select group of clients volunteered to allow Bloomberg to review keystrokes and commands most commonly used across an array of functions. Though the improvements (which Bloomberg says will come at no extra cost to the client) were impressive, the Next system felt like an evolution rather than a revolution. Nonetheless, it can’t do any damage to Bloomberg’s dominance of the trading desks of Canada and worldwide.
GOOGLE DATA
On the other end of the scale, it was announced last week that Google had done a deal with the London Stock Exchange to provide free access to real-time market data that had previously only been available on a 15-minute delay. Google will only display data based on the last price traded. As such it will lack the depth of data provided by Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters systems that are essential for professional traders. But this development will be of interest to those retail traders for whom the £12,000-plus a year professional systems are not an option. Watch this space for developers taking the free Google data and plugging it into third party trading and signal generating platforms for retail traders to use.