09:59 AM
Market Data Q&A: Bloomberg's Mark Pesonen
For more Market Data Q&As, check out AT's interviews with Fidessa and Xignite. Take a tour of Bloomberg's Tradebook trading floor.
Advanced Trading: How are buy side firms obtaining and managing their market data?
Mark Pesonen, Bloomberg:
When it comes to the data backbone, Bloomberg can deliver reference and premium data as a data license arrangement or as a real-time feed. We can address all key data concerns, including accuracy, timeliness, completeness, consistency, accessibility and affordability for a broad variety of business situations.
Regulatory and compliance concerns also require hedge fund managers to closely watch strategy execution, risk and compliance processes, trade settlement and portfolio valuation. Smaller firms sometimes do not have the operations staff required to handle this. To that end, Bloomberg's Hedge Fund Tool Box (HBOX), was designed to help fund managers, traders, operations and compliance professionals, integrate essential front-to-back office tools for equity, fixed income and FX trading strategies. Workflow is entirely managed, from pre-trade to post.
Advanced Trading: When a hedge fund gets started does every trader have a subscription to the Bloomberg Professional service or would a new firm share one or two subscriptions?
Pesonen:
The Bloomberg Professional service is familiar to many traders on the buy side, sell side and throughout the institutional investment community. It is recognized for the unmatched analytics, data, news, trading, OMS and distribution capabilities, delivered via the Bloomberg Professional service and multimedia platforms. Bloomberg is also known as a market data provider and a trusted technology partner that can deliver an end-to-end, managed solution.
Hedge funds and small to medium sized money managers look to Bloomberg for intelligent means to improve OTC order execution and avoid acquiring expensive and cumbersome data feeds and lease line arrangements. Bloomberg provides real-time data and reference data, analytics, news and other premium content, as well as distribution technology and integration services that create strategic workflow-based solutions.
This approach allows hedge funds to focus on their core competencies and generate alpha from their intellectual property, while Bloomberg manages all of the critical technological and data-related needs.
Advanced Trading: Have market data firms finally figured out a way to charge for data? Is it by the seat, or per view or per trade? Is this still an issue?
Pesonen:
Advanced Trading: How do buy side firms manage multiple market data feeds?
Pesonen:
Advanced Trading: What are the challenges for buy side firms when dealing with market data? Do they have their market data management tools in place to properly do this job?
Pesonen:
Advanced Trading: How are buy side firms dealing with storing their market data? Are they content to hand this chore over to the sell side or push it onto the cloud?
Pesonen:
We are seeing firms start to move portions of their non-proprietary data to the cloud as they become more comfortable with the practice and provider options. A hybrid solution is growing more attractive to security conscious firms who want to test the waters of the variety of cloud-based offerings.
Are buy side firms open to using cloud solutions for their market data requirements and tasks? If not, why not? Security issues? Client confidentiality?
Pesonen:
Please give us a real world example of how your firm helped a buy side client (you don't have to name them) with their market data needs. What market data challenges did they have and how did you help?
Pesonen:
Key drivers in their decision-making process included:
1. The fund's requirement to obtain larger quantities of diverse data sets
2. To distribute content (i.e. Bloomberg premium and exchange data) to Bloomberg and non-Bloomberg users3. And better manage total cost of ownership.
After an in-depth consultation, Bloomberg was able to address these needs by implementing the Bloomberg managed B-Pipe solution. By leveraging managed B-Pipe, this fund was able to provide the same premium data sets available to Bloomberg users today via the Bloomberg Professional service, while serving the non-Bloomberg users with exchange and contributor content -- all from one managed technology.
Overall, as this fund looks to expand their global footprint, Bloomberg's managed offering is well positioned to provide continued flexibility, scalability and cost-savings.
Phil Albinus is the former editor-in-chief of Advanced Trading. He has nearly two decades of journalism experience and has been covering financial technology and regulation for nine years. Before joining Advanced Trading, he served as editor of Waters, a monthly trade journal ... View Full Bio