PFSoft Adds Alliance Equities Newswire to Protrader

The Alliance News Professional Service, first launched in October 2013, provides around 500 news items per day covering 2,400 UK-listed companies to support equities, contracts for difference (CFDs), foreign exchange, options and futures traders, or for smart spread betting. The Professional Service also provides international economic indicators, central bank announcements, market reports, political news and broker rating changes.

PFSoft carried out the majority of the integration work to enable Alliance News' content to display on its Protrader platform, though the integration takes place at the client site: Alliance News will send its feed directly to customers of Protrader─which is typically white-labeled by banks and brokerage firms and rolled out to their customers─via a proprietary API to prevent any time delay, says Alliance News chief executive Tom Waite.

Users of Protrader will be able to view Alliance News headlines and articles alongside market prices, charts and other tools. Users can search and filter the news using key words and category tags, and can customize the exact time range of the news headlines displayed.

"The good thing about Protrader is that it's not just a market data terminal; it's also a trading platform. So having the news right in front of you when you're trading or carrying out research is very helpful," Waite says, adding that the main users are likely to be trading multiple asset classes. "It's not going to be people who just trading foreign exchange, but those that are trying to trade across asset classes, whether they are trading plain vanilla equities, contracts for difference, or derivatives of equities at the same time as foreign exchange."

Since launching in 2013, Alliance News has expanded its list of distributors to 15 content providers─including the UK subsidiary of Chicago-based data and investment research provider Morningstar, data and trading technology vendor Fidessa, SunGard MarketMap, and London Stock Exchange-owned data and trading terminal provider Proquote─though Waite says Protrader is the first multi-asset platform to integrate its news.

While Alliance News is solely focused on UK equities, PFSoft started in foreign exchange, and is now expanding its business to other major markets including other stocks, futures, options and contracts for difference.

"We are pleased to expand the list of available vendors for our clients. Each step we take has one, specific purpose above all other: we want Protrader to be the most functional and complete platform that has ever existed," says Roman Nalivayko, global head of business development at Protrader, in a statement. "With Alliance News, we've made one more important step in this direction."