Reinventing FAME on the Net

While it's easy to find sources of real-time market data, where does an online brokerage or investment site go to obtain historical data feeds that it needs to make back-testing available to the investment masses? Believe or not, FAME Information Services, the once monolithic, proprietary database written in a 4GL (fourth generation language) is becoming a market data infrastructure for e-finance sites and traditional buy-side customers that are pumping analytics to a Palm Pilot for roving money managers.By opening up the FAME database with a Java interface called Time IQ and a new e-data architecture, FAME executives are pitching a new strategy dubbed Open FAME that is catapulting the company into the sweet spot of the market-Internet portals and B2B financial sites. Part of that involves re-positioning FAME to help customers embed decision support components into their Web sites to service their customers, says Gerald D. Mintz, FAME's president and CEO. Financial information portals ranging from FT.com to Folio-a new site that allows investors to customize and trade their own stock baskets-are among its new Internet clients with a bunch of similar deals in the pipeline. A case in point is Xigo.com, an innovative San Francisco-based start up that will use Time IQ to access the FAME database and in the future, to build a backtesting module. Right now, Xigo.com is using agent-based technology to monitor real-time streaming text and tick-by-tick data from Bridge with historical and end-of day pricing from FAME. "We use them first of all as a data repository, we use them as an analytics enigne and then combine that with the proprietary text and tick-by-tick stuff that we are doing," says Ashish Arora, director, business development. The goal is to generate actionable information triggers to alert investors and professional investment managers-about important events around the stocks in their portfolios, explains Arora. Xigo's focus is to provide the service to high-end online brokers like Charles Schwab and E*Trade as well as financial advisors and ultimately, professional investment managers. "So for us it was important to take a sophisticated technology like FAME and try to consumerize it," says Arora. "What we're trying to do is take FAME to users that have not benefited from solutions like that before," he adds. Value Add is Non-Real Time Data Not only is FAME a technology and analytics platform that's used for storage and cleansing of time series data, but it's also an aggregator of over 60-data feeds. "Because we're data vendor neutral, we have the opportunity to work with all the different data vendors," says Mintz, noting that customers take in everything from Bloomberg Data License to Datastream, Worldscope, Compustat, First Call and I/B/E/S as well as unique third-party or proprietary data sets. FAME either redistributes the feeds or loads them on site. Traditionally, "most of the data has been internally pointed," says Larry Tabb, group director of TowerGroup's securities and investment group, who notes that it's primarily been used by equity and bond analysts doing intensive resarch on the markets who are trying to understand how historical prices will impact future pries. They are also using FAME's analytical capabilities to back-test trading models. "However, life has changed," says Tabb. "The Internet enables firms for the first time to provide data ... to their clients and a large portion of the value-add that firms can provide to clients is around consistent and interesting data. Since FAME is for many firms the core engine it just makes a lot of sense to tap into that and to be able to leverage it for clients via the Web. " Rather than reinvent the market data warehouse, Redwood Investment Systems, developer of redwood.com-a site aimed at curing the information overload problem for money managers-signed on with FAME to bring together multiple sources of historical pricing and fundamental information. "It really solved two problems: One is creating the storage for that historical information, which is important to the financial professionals and we didn't have to go out and spend a lot of time creating data loaders and formatters and all the rest of that," says Robert Leaper, Redwood's vice president, sales and business development. In March Redwood said it would outsource the management of market data to FAME and gain access to five databases, including securities and options pricing and fundamental data. Leaper said that includes Worldscope. Redwood uses FAME to centralize "best-of-breed information whether it's coming from a data sort in FAME or coming directly ... from First Call, independent of FAME," says Leaper. Redwood then applies analytics on top of that to streamline the results and deliver it in the context of the money managers' holdings.

Embracing Java For years, FAME founded in 1982, has provided time-series or temporal data to investment houses, money management firms and even central banks that use statistical data for econometric models. Quantitative analysts and the most sophisticated groups, such as Goldman Sachs derivatives group, had access to the vast historical data sets and modeling langauge. But the turning point for FAME came in mid-1999 when the company pushed to break the barriers of its proprietary technology. Gerald D. Mintz came on board as president and CEO in April to execute the strategy across the company's financial and energy market divisions. In June of 1999, the company launched a software product called Time IQ which uses Java-based tools to open access to the FAME database. "Now their technologies are not that proprietary anymore," says Xigo.com's Arora, who notes that they've been able to abstract the Java programming component in an object framework and it can talk not only to the FAME database but to Oracle, Sybase and anything that's ODBC compliant. Time IQ is also the foundation of Open FAME-a philosophy and business strategy. "It was a strategy to bring us out of being considered a proprietary technology and say use this for a broader-based market data problem that you want solved," explains Dale Richards, president of FAME's financial markets division. The problem FAME can help solve, says Mintz, is enterprise-wide information integration. According to Mintz, many customers store proprietary data in FAME, but lots of them have proprietary data in other systems. "And we can sort of sit on top of their systems and bring it all together for the client in ... an object model in Time IQ. I can help customers reach out through the Internet to any desktop in their organization to get any of that data," says Mintz. As for competitors, it's not clear whether database firms such as Factset, Stock Val and Baseline, a Primark company, are heading in the same direction, but these financial applications were closed. Meanwhile, FAME has built a whole Internet data infrastructure that's capable of delivering high-performance charting and analytics, says Richards. In June, FAME announced a hosted-charting service by partnering with Visualize Inc., called FAME iChartz, an interactive Java-based charting service ranging from stock-plotting and candlesticks to moving averages and Bollinger bands. Scheduled for launch this past summer, iChartz, is being run out of a service bureau in FAME's Ann Arbor, Mich. data center. iChartz is part of an infrastructure that also will support a new online information product called FAME Analyst-a front-end visualization and analytics layer that supports charting, portfolio list creation, downloading data into an Excel spreadsheet and interfacing with a portfolio accounting system to bring securites lists back and forth. Analyst is attached to an API (application programming interface) called Data Tone to which programmers or independent software developers can write high-performance analytical database applications that's based on historical data in FAME. At the same time, FAME is leveraging the Internet technology developed across its energy business, whose executive vice president Bill Wilson, is a former trader who most recently ran Unocol Global Trade. FAME Energy is working on Excalibur-a Web-enabled desktop analysis and research system for traders. The new technology will help the vendor target different segments of the market-such as oil or natural gas, bandwidth or electricity. It will replace PAWs (Petroleum Analysis Workstation), the 12-year old desktop system acquired from Saladin in 1998 that draws on 35 sources of data from the likes of Argus and Platts plus weather, freight and shipping rates and futures and options data, which is known as the Factset of energy. 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