Gissing Hedge Fund Market Data System
Market analysts estimate that there are more than 8,000 hedge funds worldwide. These come in all sizes, but let’s consider those with funds of $50-$200m. These funds are probably too big to just rely on hosted technology solutions from their Prime Brokers, but too small to be able to invest large amounts of money in fully-fledged market data systems and trading systems.
So what do they do? Well if Malbec Partners is anything to go by, they look around for the next best thing – a cost effective off-the-shelf package that largely does what they want but that can be tailored, and most importantly into which they can integrate their own algorithms and trading models.
Malbec was looking last year, and at the SIFMA Technology Management Conference in New York last June they found Gissing Software.
At the time Gissing didn’t have a packaged product that provided exactly the services that Malbec was looking for, but the modular nature of Gissing’s products meant that putting together a suitable solution wasn’t difficult. After working closely with the technical team at Malbec for some hours, a solution emerged – and it required only a small amount of development – to connect two components together, and a relatively small amount of integration.
Malbec successfully implemented the solution well within their timescales (see Gissing press release: “Malbec Partners selects Gissing Software to deliver market data for quantitative algorithms.”
Now Gissing is making the same technology available to other hedge-funds and buy-side firms that need it.
Essentially the Gissing Hedge Fund Market Data System enables a buy-side firm to take their own security and positions data from the Bloomberg Trading System and publish it via Gissing ConteX to all the trading terminals in the firm. Since it’s likely that these terminals will be Bloomberg terminals, the firm can use Gissing RealtimeXL to subscribe to both the live market data on the Bloomberg terminal and to the firm’s own security and position information via Gissing ConteX. This information can then be combined and provided to the firm’s own algorithmic trading application running either in Microsoft Excel (useful for initial testing and modeling) or in a dedicated Java application. Trades can be executed on the Bloomberg terminal and, of course, the updated security and position information becomes available to everyone in the firm in real-time via the Bloomberg Trading System.
This is in effect a “mini” market data platform that enables a Hedge Fund or other buy-side firm that uses Bloomberg for both its trading and position keeping to take advantage of the latest algorithmic trading techniques. In doing so they differentiate their strategy from that of their competitors, while they retain the advantages of the integrated Bloomberg system.
For further information please contact us at sales@gissing.com.
|
