New Tool Prioritizes Critical Data & News for Traders & Investors
With the surge in data feeds and social media, traders and portfolio managers are sifting through tons of noise to find the relevant news or events that will have an impact on securities holdings.
To focus on critical event-driven data, S&P Capital IQ teamed up with Kuberre Systems to launch a new tool for traders, market makers, and portfolio managers that provides real-time alerts about relevant news and information affecting their investment holdings. Announced on Tuesday, Event Fusion draws upon different streams, aggregating news about events that users consider relevant, and then provides real-time notifications across a wide range of devices, the company said in its press release.
Event Fusion is an open, cloud-enabled platform for aggregation and alerts of events that matter to investment industry professionals, says Kumar Metlapalli, founder and CEO of Kuberre Systems, a Boston-based data management and analytics company.
The problem the company is addressing is the tremendous growth in data and the industry processes surrounding that, says Metlapalli. “Today if you look at traders and market makers they spend so much time on screens monitoring the data coming in, versus filtering what they care about.” What they want to know is which event will impact their holdings positively or negatively.
“The challenges are: How do I consolidate all this data coming in, and how do I prioritize in terms of signals, and how do I integrate that into my decision process?”
The data can come from multiple sources including proprietary signals that internal quant teams have generated as well as social media, he says.
“There’s lot of value in integrating our data with the front-end software that Kuberre brings,” says Ilyaas Meeran, director of product and content at S&P Capital IQ, a business unit of McGraw Hill Financial.
Event Fusion offers a simple process for incorporating market data or news feed subscriptions and bundling them with social media or other unstructured data sources, states the release. In addition, Kuberre has developed technology so that the service sends low-latency, event-driven alerts based on changes in S&P Capital IQ's "most valuable" indicators delivered in machine-readable format. The companies said this is the fastest way to receive credit rating changes publicly available in the market.
Event-driven alerts
Event Fusion is offering S&P Capital IQ's Event Driven Alerts ratings information, along with its reference data capabilities -- including business entity and instrument cross-reference services. S&P’s EAD feed brings real-time credit changes and many other datasets that are part of that feed, and that is already included and integrated into Event Fusion platforms. “Users can create sophisticated complex rules, such as if credit jumps two notches, then alert me on any instrument held in the portfolio,” says Metlapalli.
There is also the concept of event hierarchy and filtering. For example, a portfolio manager may get thousands of events from some corporate entity. “An alert is generated only if that alert happens to be in the portfolio. So there is no need for watching the terminal constantly,” he says. Also, alerts can be customized down to the entity level. If someone holds a security from GE, there could be a negative impact on an underlying subsidiary. It could be coming in on the subsidiary. “Unless you have entity hierarchy, it doesn’t know.” Event hierarchy is incorporated into the platform to make it easy for the user, “who doesn’t need to worry about integrating the different datasets and social media, which is all taken care of by our platform engine on the back end.”
On the data management side, Event Fusion expects clients to have different portfolios and underlying constituents. Event Fusion must match the securities the users have in their portfolios with the incoming data feeds. “The beauty of this is we expect users to put in zero effort on the data management side. You sign up and you can get going in the first hour,” says Metlapalli.
Out of the box, Event Fusion comes with preconfigured data handlers for consolidating events from various sources. These include: macro-economic factors; social media feeds (Twitter, Linkedin, Stock Twits, and Facebook); news feeds (Dow Jones, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Reuters); and internal feeds from analyst research, comments, and quant scores.
Hosted on the cloud as a managed service, Event Fusion leverages Hadoop to map alerts against multiple portfolios. For example, if a trader is responsible for four portfolios, the platform supports different alerts such as for one sensitive to credit rating changes and another sensitive to early announcement dates. “Hadoop gives us the massive parallelism it needs on the back end,” says Meeran.
Users only see the alerts, which they view as flashing on screen, as pings or text, or daily briefings in an email. They can set their own preferences for viewing the alerts themselves, without needing IT resources, according to Metlapalli. “Many of them look at their screens all day; really they just want to be notified in real time.” For some, he says, flashing may be the fastest way to be notified that something has changed in the portfolio.
Kuberre has already integrated three major data vendors, including S&P Capital IQ, and plans to continue to add more data sources. S&P Capital IQ’s Event Driven Alerts feed is already in production. “If there are market moving events or breaking news out there that could be pertinent to an end-user or investment professional, they may look at Event Fusion to consolidate those different data sources,” says Meeran.
Ivy is Editor-at-Large for Advanced Trading and Wall Street & Technology. Ivy is responsible for writing in-depth feature articles, daily blogs and news articles with a focus on automated trading in the capital markets. As an industry expert, Ivy has reported on a myriad ... View Full Bio
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