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The provision of accurate and timely market data is truly the lifeblood of almost every financial services organisation worldwide. Every day these orgaisation rely on the latest stock prices, financial instrument attributes, corporate action events, rates and analytics in order to make trading decisions, reconcile their accounts and track their performance.

These requirements for a steady stream of vast quantities of data have give rise to a number of extremely successful market data organisations who collate their data from the exchanges and brokers and package it up so it can easily be consumed by banks, investment managers and anyone else who can afford to sign up for an account.

Two of the major players in the market data business are Bloomberg and Reuters. Their market data products are very similar and allow their clients to subscribe to market data feeds via several mechanisms, including ‘Pay-As-You-Go’ whereby you can make requests for information (eg prices and attributes) about a particular financial instrument (eg BHP Ordinary Shares) and they send back the details, for which you pay ‘Per Security’ - currently around $2(USD), depending on security tyep (Bond, Equity, Derivative, etc). Alternatively you can subscribe to entire segments of security data in a ‘batch’, for instance ‘Asian Equities’, and receive the entire universe of those securities daily. The choice of mechanism really depends on how many securities of a particular type the client needs data for and what the most cost effective mechanism is at the time. Read more »

Build Process

Coding standards are a very important aspect of software development. Coding standards is not just about naming standards, but also includes using a standard pre tested and robust set of common core libraries, where appropriate using simple tested and tried design patterns, and quality control, to ensure standards are enforced.

Some of the main benefits of using set of coding standards, is to improve the quality of software delivered and uniformity of code which assist with maintainability. It is often said that if you cannot tell who has written code in an applications code base then that is a good start. Defining standards early, appropriate to the specific project and software and tools used, is important to help reduce the amount of refactoring that will need to be done later in the project at a greater cost.

There are many pre-defined examples of coding standards, which can be used as a starting point for your own standards, applicable to your own specific project. Tools can assist in implementing standards, such as Resharper and to enforce these standards, such as FXCop.

Enterpise ETL

Buildmasters have been involved with moving data from A to B for a number of years and have seen all manner of ETL architectures and designs. One thing we have learnt is that no implementation is ever the same, however there are a series of common principles that should be applied in any ETL project in order to guarantee success and avoid delivering something into production that is a monster to support. Read more »

Eagle PACE

With out 3rd major software release due in 40 days success is really reliant on some pretty effective collaboration between the multiple moving parts that need to come together on the day like one big well-oiled machine. That’s why I’m so glad that we setup our ‘War Room’ meeting. Each morning at 9am 20 indivduals descend on Meeting Room One from their various teams and take stock of progress over the previous 24hrs.

From the top we have : the Delivery Manager, ultimately responsible for the successful implementation of the release into Production; the Project Manager, reponsible for coordinating the campaign and keeping us all revved up; the Test Director and test team leads, responsible for executing 500 test cases with 100% success rates through System Test, Joint System Test  and Joint Acceptance Testing; the Trading System BA, responsible for design and development of the BlackRock Trading Platform component; the Data Management System team lead, responsible for the 40+ integration components they feed data throughout the solution; the Enterprise Services team lead, responsible for scheduling of data feeds; the Environments team lead, reponsible for servers, hardware and dealing with the spate of City-wide power-cuts we’ve had recently!!! Finally there’s the ‘Stats Guy’, responsible for compiling an impressive array of graphs and statistics that boil down the infite number of variables that all the other members generate during any given day into something that can meaningfully be discussed in under 45 minutes. Read more »