Truly "Open" Bloomberg?

Interesting couple of articles from Inside Reference Data and Inside Market Data. The first is on Bloomberg making its codes freely available to all from its website http://bsym.bloomberg.com - given past standards-based attempts like ISINs falling short of providing the industry with unique and useful security IDs this looks to be a welcome addition. This seems to be a publicity "win" for Bloomberg, especially given rival Thomson Reuters has recently got some indifferent publicity with the EU over RIC licensing (see article). No prizes for anyone who thinks that Thomson Reuters will not respond in some way with regard to RIC usage, maybe giving us two working proprietary standards that go "open" - at least everyone would then be matching up Bloomberg Tickers and Reuters RICs in public rather behind closed doors - and maybe a good opportunity for a Wiki site to do the matching up?

The second relates to Bloomberg providing a open-source data distribution system called "The Platform", I presume as less expensive alternative to Reuters RMDS. Meanwhile Reuters is busying itself with the plans for its competitor to the Open Bloomberg terminal with "Project Utah". Obviously Bloomberg is comparatively unproven with regard to systems provision so this is a big change and will be very interesting to watch - from a technology point of view but also culturally since can Bloomberg turn away from thinking in "Terminals" all of the time?

Tick Size Harmony...

...in a rare show of co-operation (I wonder what is the carrot or (regulatory) stick here to motivate this?) European exchanges and MTFs seem to have agreed on standardising tick sizes (or at least to have two standards rather than twenty five!). Extract from article on AutomatedTrader:

"From the perspective of each trading venue, strong incentives exist to undercut others in terms of tick sizes, which is not in the interest of market efficiency or the users and end investors. This might, in turn, lead to excessively reduced tick sizes in the market. Excessively granular tick sizes in securities can have a detrimental effect to market depth (i.e. to liquidity). An excessive granularity of tick sizes could lead to significantly increased costs for the many users of each exchange throughout the value chain; and have spillover costs for the derivatives exchanges' clients."

Data Pirates and Getting a Share of the Booty

Seems like data piracy (illegal sharing of logon IDs and scraping data) is costing the financial information industry around $8 billion in subscription revenue each year reports Inside Market Data. My first reaction is that $8 billion is a lot to loose, and shows just how (surprisingly?) big the whole market is ($23 billion apparently). My second is that I wonder how many end-users who share logins illegally would not that if they faced the full costs, so maybe the number should be a lot less? Either way the stat is interesting, particularly at a time when Bloomberg seems (!) to be taking a more constructive stance on data provision and partnering. Ironic also that the report suggests that the biggest set of guilty parties on illegal page scraping are the data vendors themselves, checking on each others data.

The company that put the survey together, Burton-Taylor, seem to have some interesting background on the major data vendors. The first is on news content, saying that Bloomberg seems to concentrate on news alerts whereas Reuters seems to put more emphasis on news analysis.  The second shows shows financial information/analysis revenue broken down by vendor and geography in 2008, showing how dominant Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg are in the US and EMEA, with Quick having significant share with the big two in Asia. The third shows revenue broken down by segment and geography with FX/Fixed Income Sales & Trading, Equity Sales & Trading, Investment Management and Corporate expenditure dominating. 

Libor no more...

Following the ongoing story of Libor diverging from the OIS rate (see earlier post), Risk magazine reports that Libor risks losing its place as a funding benchmark. Spreads against the OIS have tightened recently (see recent article in the FT), but Mustafa Chowdhury, head of US interest rate research at Deutsche Bank in New York, says that Libor is becoming less relevant as a benchmark due to banks accessing other sources of funding such as Federal Reserve Funds.

Time to change all of those benchmark yield curves across the entire institution and understand all of the pricing differences? Ouch! Maybe wait a while yet...

Transparency for troubled times

I came across this pair of quotes on a google search, bringing data management into the context of the current financial crisis:

"Where is the wisdom? Lost in the knowledge. Where is the knowledge? Lost in the information." - T.S. Eliot

"Where is the information? Lost in the data. Where is the data? Lost in the ******* database." - JoeCelko

Here's to hoping that wisdom is not in short supply at the moment...

Real-time holidays...

...on a happier note than real-time death data (see earlier post) then holiday data is also real-time - a link with statistics from one of our hedge fund contacts on holiday data:

http://www.financialcalendar.com/freestuff/getreal.htm