Thomson Builds One for Hedge Funds

Thomson Financial will release this week two new versions of Thomson One that are tailored for hedge fund clients, officials tell Inside Market Data.

Thomson created the solutions to address the gap between hedge funds and traditional buy-side data consumers, says Albert Lojko, senior vice president of institutional equities at Thomson.

"With traditional buy-side firms, a portfolio manager does the stock selection then hands it off to a trader... to execute. In the hedge fund world, that role is combined, so the person making the decision is also doing the trading. So pre-trade analytics and decision tools are a big advantage for them," he says.

Thomson One Hedge Fund Trading and Thomson One Hedge Fund Management are based on the same underlying content sets, but the trading solution also contains liquidity information for those actively involved in trading, while the fund management version is geared toward pre-trade decision support.

Both provide access to Thomson's First Call research and estimates, StreetEvents calendar, Baseline earnings and performance analysis product, and AutEx order-routing network, as well as global equities and derivatives market data. Lojko says the solutions also include some fixed-income data so that users can drill down on a company across its stock, derivatives and debt. Both also include Thomson Financial News and the ability to integrate content from other sources.

Potential customers may already be using the individual underlying content sets separately, but the combined solutions will provide greater intelligence than the standalone offerings, Lojko says.

The two products also offer new functions, including an Events Analysis tool that uses intraday price movements directly after events such as earnings announcements to predict the effect of future events. FlexMonitor, a spreadsheet function built directly into the display, allows traders to write trading strategies into the solutions and then monitors deals and spreads before generating alerts when opportunities arise. Lojko says it provides the modeling capabilities of Excel without affecting processing speed.

Lojko says some clients have already signed up, but he declines to name them.

Max Bowie