SIFMA Roundup: News From the Floor

CodeStreet unveiled Market Data Works, its suite of tools for monitoring and developing to real-time market data feeds. Market Data Works comprises Market Data Studio for developers to create and save scenarios within data for testing applications; Market Data Metrics, which can be used by market data administrators to project data rates and monitor latency; and Market Data Warehouse, which can be used with any JDBC database such as Sybase or Oracle for anyone with a need to store data for analysis.

The tools are designed to work with data from the Reuters Market Data System, or any source of data in CSV format. CodeStreet chief executive Howard Pein says the tools will be priced low enough to appeal to all potential users.

Microsoft also unveiled tools for developers, including .Net StockTrader, which provides best practice guidance specifically for the design of trading systems. "We're not trying to give Wall Street functional requirements for building OMSes… but we want to give firms guidance about how they can build apps to deliver optimal performance," says Stevan Vidich, industry architect in Microsoft's Financial Services Group.

Progress Software's Apama algo trading division launched its FX Market Aggregation Accelerator, a version of the vendor's core event processing engine with market connectivity and user interfaces customized for the increasingly high-frequency FX trading market. The platform currently includes adapters to seven FX markets, including EBS, Hotspot FX and Currenex, and the vendor is currently developing more connectors for other markets. Though the core platform can be used across asset classes, and is already used by some firms for automated FX trading, the vendor has developed FX-specific analytics that can be used for rules-based arbitrage trading between currencies, or for position management, risk calculation or auto hedging, officials say.

The Blocks Company, a data visualization subsidiary of Worden Brothers Inc., demonstrated version 2 of its Blocks software that allows users to graphically drag and drop analytic components together to create charting and analysis packages running against data sourced from Interactive Data, Ipreo's Hemscott business and Zacks Investment Research. The software, which can be downloaded from the vendor's Web site, is designed to replace its legacy Telechart product, which had charting capabilities but was not as open and customizable as Blocks, and only provided around 10 indicators, whereas the new software provides hundreds of indicators, says chief software engineer Ken Glib.

First Coverage, a Toronto- and Boston-based provider of software for sharing and evaluating sell-side trade ideas, announced that its system is now fully live, and that trade ideas distributed to investment managers over the platform during Q4 2006 and Q1 2007 outperformed market indexes by more than 300 basis points. The system allows buy-side firms to invite sell-side firms from whom they wish to receive trade ideas onto the platform, and can rank them individually, and tracks the performance of ideas—whether or not a manager actually took a position as a result—by factors including idea, dealer, sector, or the broker-dealer's level of conviction. "If you can select better firms, you get better alpha for your investors," says CEO Randy Cass. He says "tens of thousands" of ideas are now crossing the system, and that 100 firms are using the platform, though he declines to break down that number by sell-side and buy-side participants.

Web search technology provider Connotate introduced the second generation of its software, and introduced an Agent Studio for creating software "agents" that automatically read Web sites for new information and send alerts via various means, such as email, a database or a user interface. Agent Studio replaces the vendor's former Web Mining Server with a newer interface that supports faster creation of new agent types and multi-site agents. The vendor also introduced a redesigned Agent Library to support collaboration on agents, so that even if an analyst leaves a firm, their "knowledge" is retained, says Connotate CEO Bruce Molloy. Connotate has also rebuilt its Agent server for greater scalability and the ability to support server farms running large numbers of agents for large firms.

Comtex News Network took advantage of SIFMA to launch version 2.0 of its SmarTrend online stock trend alert service, which generates Uptrend and Downtrend alerts on more than 4,400 North American stocks based on analysis of up to three years of historical data, and distributes them to users along with related news headlines.

Interactive Data unveiled a new real-time desktop display aimed at off-trading floor users such as wealth managers and retail brokers, based on the vendor's Futuresource derivatives data product, but with the addition of equities, fixed-income and FX data as well as enhanced news, research and charting capabilities. Mark Hepsworth, president of Interactive Data's Real-Time Services division, says the vendor has previously marketed similar products at its non-institutional active trader community, but that the proposed merger between Thomson Corp. and Reuters is creating a need for terminal products that can provide alternatives to those vendors' off-floor products.