Here's the text of the original white paper:
Actian Market Data Analytics for Capital Banking:
Providing opportunity for growth, security, market awareness
Overview
To extract maximum value from market data, companies need to ingest current data and combine it with contextualizing real-time and historical data. But the massive quantities of information present major challenges in collecting and maintaining the level of granularity necessary to support near real-time analysis. And market information isn’t the only data that firms need to incorporate. Other overarching occurrences, such as corporate mergers, balance sheet projections, social behavior, and global events, often can have a profound impact on markets behavior. Once firms have clean data repositories, they can begin to uncover and predict future opportunities or threats that can be harvested from patterns or relationships presented in the data.
Many organizations, however, are using incumbent solutions, employing a sample set of data pulled from a segment of the totality of available information, losing out on multiple insights that the entirety of data might reveal. Legacy approaches, with their dated architecture, are not suited for agile connectivity to highly disparate sources, or the ability to scale to the data volumes and compute speed needed in today’s marketplace. Yet the complexity, cost, and overwhelming data volumes present challenges to even the most sophisticated firms.
The Actian Analytics Platform provides high-performance, extreme scale computing via parallelism and distributed and optimized processing. Precision predictive analytics with extreme speed allow for the constant optimization of strategies and market execution efficiency, capitalizing on opportunities faster while maximizing returns.
Partial Data Provides Partial Solution
The act of reviewing, correlating, and deciphering market activity requires running expansive analytics over terabytes, if not petabytes, of consolidated, clean data. Legacy systems are challenged by this volume of data in equities alone, yet equity options market data volumes exceed that of Equities by an order of magnitude. Options information, reported via the OPRA (Options Price Reporting Authority) data feed, contains data volumes disseminated in the millions of messages per second. This torrent of data moves so fast that it presents its own special challenges, as any monetary move in equities impacts 1000s of options and their pricing levels. All this comes at a time when firms are looking to further enrich their analyses with additional big data (e.g., social sentiments, news events, machine data, etc.) in order to search for Alpha and generate new trading strategies.
Today, data needs to be collected, integrated, stored, and analyzed in seconds and minutes──speed of process is the key. And data no longer means just price. Modern queries are more likely to include log files, ticker data, posted orders and quotes, orders modifications or cancellations, trade executions against those orders, off-exchange trade executions, and so much more. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. External data also must be integrated in such a way that it is all related to any given point in time.
In addition, Over the Counter (OTC) product data is less centralized—therefore the ability to collect, build, and derive market data-driven decisions for these and other products (bonds, ETFs, Derivatives, SWAPS, etc.) is much more difficult. However, while difficult, the mastery of derived OTC data and pricing has become a significant differentiator.
More Data = Better Valuation, Simulation, and Risk Calculations
Financial leaders know that understanding as many data points as possible, in a timely manner, leads to greater insights, better decisions, and, ultimately, higher returns. So business leaders collect all this data, store it securely, and then are left wondering what happens next. How do you calculate meaningful analytics from this ocean of data? How do you collect contextual data? How can the data tell of relationships in the market that you don’t see yourself? Where are the hidden opportunities for alpha? Where are the emerging risks? And how do you process all this data so as to discover these insights in time to benefit the business?
Benefits of the Actian Analytics Platform
The Actian Analytics Platform allows businesses to store limitless volumes of market data at affordable costs, structured and unstructured, on a flexible, scalable platform. It then creates links between disparate data sets, enabling the application of powerful analytical models to be run on the collective data for smarter strategy development. The Actian platform, with a library of more than 700 analytical functions, leverages historical analysis and back testing, enabling the discovery of new insights to better exploit market opportunities, thereby allowing organizations to align trading strategies to market behavior.
With Actian, market participants can incorporate a wider variety of data sources—mobile, social, transactional, Internet of Things, geo-spatial data, additional third-party data, and more. Actian’s highly flexible, hardware agnostic, cost-effective solution can scale from terabytes up to multi-petabytes by incrementally adding commodity servers to an existing infrastructure. In addition, with Actian, you can:
Identify relationships that exist between instruments across asset classes and external events
Reduce the overall TCO of Market Data
Run intra-day risk analysis, stress testing, and predictive analytics to better shape outcomes
Oversee compliance, align with regulatory requirements
View consolidated audit trail (CAT), advanced TCA, and portfolio fidelity
Actian turns mountains of data into value by harnessing insights that predict and prevent business-compromising events ahead of time while identifying business-growth opportunities that would otherwise go unrealized. Across a wide and diverse spectrum of functionality—strategic business planning, market data re-engineering, cost optimization, financial and operational risk analysis, compliance, or performance metrics—Actian delivers. |
