WSOD Develops Alerts for Broker Using StreamBase

Boulder, Colo.-based software and research platform provider Wall Street on Demand is building a new client portfolio alerting function for an un-named online broker client, officials say. The service uses the Stream Processing Engine from Lexington, Mass.-based software vendor StreamBase.

John Leslie, chief technology officer at WSOD, says the vendor has signed an enterprise license for the StreamBase software and will use it for a variety of projects, the first of which is to provide market update alerts based on real-time analysis of end users' portfolios. Initially this solution is being private-labelled for one of WSOD's online broker clients, but Leslie says the company will eventually roll out the service to several others.

WSOD already sends out between 300,000 and 600,000 messages to end users each day, alerting them to information such as price movements or earnings releases. To date, that has been done based on free text or symbols for individual securities. But Leslie says customers were increasingly asking WSOD to provide that analysis on portfolios of symbols as well. "So we needed an engine that could scale up to do real-time analysis of hundreds of thousands of portfolios," he says.

WSOD takes real-time data into the StreamBase SPE, which calculates derived prices and then sends those prices via the client's data distribution system to an alerting system that generates individual alerts to end users.

"Their throughput requirements were huge," says StreamBase marketing vice president Bill Hobbib, referring to the volume of portfolios and individual securities that WSOD needs to analyze. "They have a lot of high-performance needs, while at the same time a high degree of complexity. This allows WSOD to take data and run calculations on it from lots of different sources."

Leslie says WSOD considered whether to buy or build a solution earlier this year. It signed a deal with StreamBase around the start of April without even considering any other vendors because WSOD needed fast time to market and the ability to rapidly enter a quasi-production environment that would test the system's ability to cope with the levels of data required.

"We've got the experience... [but] we had a client that wanted a solution 'yesterday,' so I was looking for something that would provide time to market... sooner than if we had to build the entire infrastructure from scratch," Leslie says. "So we had it up, actually evaluating a couple hundred thousand portfolios... even though we weren't actually triggering any alerts downstream."

The alerts are typically generated on retail investors' portfolios traded via online brokers, which link to Web pages hosted by WSOD and branded in the style of the broker.

"If you enter a ticker on their site, chances are you will be transferred to Web pages that we private label and host on their behalf... that allow you to set up an alert profile," Leslie says. "And when we fire off an alert, it has a link that says, 'If you want to act on this information, go to [the broker site].' They are pretty sophisticated linkages. You might bounce back and forth three or four times during the course of a session."