Big Data for Finance

Contextualising Your Data

By Simon Smith, Granger Smith Consulting
www.grangersmithconsulting.com 

The ever growing amount of digital data available poses a real challenge to current search solutions, because they could potentially lack relevance, timeliness and adaptability. BI systems have traditionally focused upon structured data, for example; costs, margins and sales, and it is now becoming essential for a reporting tool to provide unstructured data and for both sets of data to be integrated.

Bloomberg, Orange Integrate Messaging, Voice for Compliance

Bloomberg has joined with Orange Business Services - Trading Solutions to help firms archive and manage voice records of their business transactions.  Bloomberg's cloud-based Vault enterprise information service is the host for the integration.

NYSE Technologies to Distribute SMA Social Media Sentiment Analytics

NYSE Technologies has teamed with Chicago's Social Market Analytics (SMA) to distribute the latter's sentiment statistics, derived from social media, via its SFTI Network and its SuperFeed consolidated data feed.

SMA’s engine extracts, evaluates and calculates data in real-time to attempt to generate directional and volatility indications on individual stocks, ETFs, sectors, and indices by measuring the level and quality of social media interactions on social media sources relative to historical levels.

Founded by former Thomson Reuters execs, SMA taps into the twitter 'firehose' and calculates so-called S-Factors.  These include scores that not only indicate positive or negative views, but place a value on the level of sentiment, about a stock or a market.

DCM Capital Taps Social Media For Sentiment Trading

London-based hedge fund-turned-trading and technology vendor DCM Capital has released DCM Dealer, a retail trading platform for CFD (Contract For Difference) and spreadbetting, incorporating sentiment ratings derived from Twitter and Facebook updates.

Infinigon Group Generating Realtime Trading Signals From Twitter

New York City-based Infinigon Group is emerging from stealth mode and is working with select trading firms to test their software, which provides trading signals by analysing Twitter activity in real time.

Digital Reasoning, Tableau, Cloudera Focus Unstructured Data Analytics on Financial Markets

Partnering with Tableau Software for data visualisation, and leveraging Cloudera's Hadoop distribution for storage, Digitial Reasoning is applying its Synthesys unstructured data analytics platform at financial markets applications.

Q&A: Thomson Reuters' Rich Brown on Machine Readable News, Social Media and Sentiment

BigDataForFinance.com's sister community - Low-Latency.com - just conducted an insightful Q&A with Rich Brown, who leads machine readable news programs at Thomson Reuters.  It's a topic that spans both low latency and big data, and you can read it here.

Q&A: Dataminr's Ted Bailey on Hotspots Among The Hashtags

Specialising in creating "actionable insights" for financial traders from the deafening noise that is Twitter, Dataminr recently made its own news by raising $13 million in Series B funding (for a total to date of $16 million).  We spoke to Dataminr founder and CEO Ted Bailey to find out more about the company and its big data challenge with the Twitter firehose. 

Q: How did Dataminr get started, and what is its focus?

A: I started the firm with two former roommates from Yale University – Jeff Kinsey and Sam Hendel – with combined experience in social media analytics,big data, and finance.  The company is focused on extracting value from social media for clients in finance and government.

Alacra Taps Connotate For Web Data

Alacra has turned to Connotate to provide web scraping functionality to incorporate in its data integration and legal entity mapping services.

Q&A: Benchmark Solutions' Tim Grant on OTC Market Modeling with Big Data

Pricing and transparency in the OTC markets has been a key regulatory focus since the credit crisis of 2008.  But unlike exchange-based markets, data from OTC trading is high in volume, comes in many different formats, and from many different sources - big data in realtime.  Tim Grant, head of sales and marketing at Benchmark Solutions, describes how his company makes sense of it all.

Q: When was Benchmark Solutions founded, and what does it do that's new, and needed?

A: Benchmark Solutions was founded in 2009 by Jim Toffey (formerly the CEO and founder of Tradeweb) and is financially backed by venerable private equity house, Warburg Pincus.  The company was established to solve the long-time pricing and transparency problem in the OTC fixed income markets, becoming the world’s first provider of real time pricing for US dollar corporate bonds and credit default swaps.