Bridge Launches Major Upgrade To Equities Feed

NEW YORK--Bridge Information Systems is unveiling a major upgrade to its interactive equities feed this week that the vendor says will give users an alternative to Reuters' Selectfeed Plus. At the same time, Bridge is also releasing a feedhandler for Reuters' Triarch digital data distribution platform that takes advantage of the enhancements to the feed.

Bridgefeed Equities 3.10 is a "full service" equities feed that is "suitable for customers around the world in virtually any data distribution environment," says Ken Marlin, executive vice president responsible for the data feeds group. Marlin says Tibco, BT/Syntegra and Midas-Kapiti International are all working on feedhandlers for the new version of the feed. The feed provides data on equities, equity options, futures and futures options.

Marlin declines to comment on the price of the upgraded equities feed, but a Bridge source says fees are 20 percent to 30 percent lower than Reuters charges for Selectfeed and Selectfeed Plus. In addition, the source says Bridge can deliver the feed, which carries 500,000 equity and equity option instruments, on a single line to a single server.

The Bridgefeed interactive data feed was first released about a year ago (IMD, Jan. 16, 1996). It was built around the API for Knight-Ridder's Interactive Digital Feed (IDF) and had two flavors: Bridgefeed Equities and Bridge feed Capital Markets. Bridgefeed Capital Markets was available through a Unix server and Equities was available through a Windows NT environment.

The new version of Bridgefeed Equities includes 17,000 pages of the 18,000 pages of data available through Bridgefeed Capital Markets. Marlin says that Bridge will have all 18,000 pages of the Capital Markets data running through the NT server by the end of the second quarter.

Meanwhile, an upgraded version of Bridgefeed Capital Markets is also being rolled out this week.

Marlin says the upgraded Bridgefeed Equities has a number of advantages over the competition. The first is the quality of its options coverage. "We built into our options symbols a lot of information that makes it easy for someone working with a feed to understand a lot about an option," he says. In addition, all of the symbology is generated from software, "so it's always consistent and more accurate" than symbology that's inserted manually, he says.

The feed is also very reliable, Marlin says. "In the last six months, it has become an unbelievably robust, industrial strength, reliable data feed," he says.

Marlin says the new release of the feed also provides time and sales information, and does so "much faster than anyone else." The feed provides that data for every tick, he says. Bridge also integrates the error correction and cancellation messages from exchanges, Marlin says.

In addition, the new version of the feed "is the best feed in the world for historical data," Marlin says. The feed provides access to 3,000 days of daily history for every instrument and 21 days of ticks, he says.

Bridgefeed Equities also now provides market maker data from around the world. The feed provides quote and trade information for the day for a particular stock, instead of just the most recent bid and offer. "When you tell the system you want to start following Microsoft, the feed will bring you all the bids and offers for the day for Microsoft. I don't think anybody does that," Marlin says.

The new release also supports access to the 15,000 Bridge analytical displays for monitoring global market conditions and specific instruments. These displays were previously only available on Bridge workstations. The displays include market overviews; rankings; technical summaries; and corporate, fundamental and analytical profiles.

At the same time it is rolling out the major upgrade of the equities feed, Bridge is also introducing Bridgefeed Capital Markets 2.36, a new version of that feed. The speed has been upgraded to 64 kilobits/second from 19.2, and the feed has been enhanced to take advantage of a Triarch environment, Marlin says.

With the release of Bridge's Triarch feedhandler, Bridgefeed Capital Markets will be fully compliant with Reuters' Data Access Control System (DACS) 4.2, Marlin says. "This is something a lot of our customers have asked for," Marlin says.

"We have made it much easier for a customer to permission data to the individual user level through Triarch and other data distribution platforms," Marlin says. Bridge has done this by creating logical sets of data such as energy, metals, softs, lumber, transportation and livestock, he says.

The feed also allows users with the appropriate application to filter news stories by category.

Marlin says about 40 sites have Bridgefeed in trial, "some of whom have been waiting for these new features."

Meanwhile, the Bridge Global Ticker--the former Telesphere Global Ticker--has been converted to the Bridge database for international data as of Jan. 31. About one-third of the Ticker's international data was supplied by former parent Telekurs.

The next step in integrating Global Ticker into Bridge is to begin phasing in use of the Bridge database for US data. US data is currently sourced directly.

As a result of the shift to the Bridge database for international data, Global Ticker now includes data from the following exchanges: Quito; Surabaya; Guayaquil; Beirut; Ljubljana; Easdaq; Bratislava; Bucharest; Tallinn; Valpariso; San Jose; Panama; Cyprus; Bahrain; Cairo; Casablanca; Valencia; Bilbao; and Belfox.

Meanwhile, Bridge has added international data to its database that it did not previously carry, to support clients who previously received data via Telesphere. The data includes: the Vienna, Dublin, Berne, Antwerp, Rio, Bogaya and Dhaka stock exchanges and Spanish regionals.