OTCGH Preps Market Data Screens for EOXLive Brokerage Platform

Until now, OTCGH has not operated a dedicated pricing screen on its EOXLive platform, but rather has distributed market data from its 16 brokerages via a number of third-party providers, including Chicago-based energy data management provider GlobalView, Bloomberg, Interactive Data, ZE PowerGroup and Morningstar.

However, the group is now working on a project to build market data pages into the EOXLive platform, so users do not have to move to separate screens to access prices. "Until recently, the EOX platform and market data have been fairly disjointed and operated in a vacuum, software-wise, so we are slowly integrating everything to better serve the customers of market data and the actual brokers and their trading staff," says Campbell Faulkner, chief data analyst at OTCGH.

Previously, OTCGH operated separate databases and computation servers for its EOX platform and market data. "Going forward, we will retain separate calculation engines because of the way the infrastructure is actually built, but what is changing is that we're going to start seeing slow integration of market data into the actual EOX client," Faulkner says.

The markets pages will provide real-time market data, updated as often as new quotes or trades occur, though many of OTCGH's instruments are highly illiquid and do not trade frequently, he adds.

The integration will enable brokerage customers to access prices from a single interface rather than having the data segregated across several screens.

"At the end of the day, you are competing for a small sliver of real estate on the customer's desktop, so the fewer screens, and the less cumbersome and fiddly the widgets are, the more likely it is that someone will actually look at the data," Faulkner says. "Many of our customers are running a Bloomberg screen and a WebICE screen and chat, and it's just difficult to compete for space. So if you can combine multiple features into one piece of software, then it's a somewhat better value-add."

OTCGH is currently working with a number of its larger liquidity providers to test the market data screens, which are likely to appeal to existing brokerage customers who regularly execute trades with the broker, as opposed to sporadic users who only check prices once a month.

Faulkner says OTCGH's bids, offers and transactions data can be used in conjunction with other modeled datasets to provide insight into the value of illiquid instruments. "I wouldn't say it's transparent, but it gives users a better handle on the value of these really nasty OTC products when otherwise, it's really a shot in the dark to know where something is traded," he adds.