Building a fully featured real-time and historical data distribution system with feature rich terminal applications

Consider this scenario.

Apart from staff salary costs, the provision of real-time and historical data to traders, middle office and back office staff can be one of the biggest expenditures for a trading bank, investment bank or hedge fund. With the market in real-time data systems being controlled by basically 2 behemoth conglomerates, price competition between them is not exactly what you would call fierce and some of our more cynical customers we have spoken to believe that the prices are in fact set on a collusion basis. Whether this is true or not, the cost of a desktop solution from either of the 2 major real-time data vendors can easily run into US30,000 per user, per data vendor, per annum. The more influential traders can often have 2 or more desktop data systems and then there are the costs of back-up facilities and stand-by trading rooms equipped with “ready to go” real-time data systems that most of the time are sitting gathering cobwebs, but never-the-less costing a fortune to maintain.

Do all your traders need the systems that they justified in times when their profits were more easily obtained?

Can all the middle off and back office staff that wanted one of these real-time data systems really justify the expenditure now that credit markets have collapsed or can the scope of what is provided be reduced to save costs?

Are there ways for you to put together a range of real-time and historical data services internally that may not have all the bells and whistles of the “Big 2” desktop solutions but would be more than adequate for most traders and other staff?

At DTS we believe that there are ways to create your own real-time and historical data distribution system cost effectively and we believe that we have many of the components that you would require. Medium to long term this will lead to huge savings.

As an example, have you considered replacing many of your “Big 2” terminals with an internal system and not paying per terminal for all that software that doesn’t get used. You could use some or all of the “Big 2” datafeeds as part of the feeds for the information displayed by your own terminals but you would be buying the data wholesale and you can supplement that data with your own sources or DTS can assist with adding historical databases.

At DTS we have developed real-time data distribution systems that are low latency and highly optimized. By putting together one of our solutions, you could also consider providing low cost market data solutions to your own clients.

One of the advantages of this approach is that the traders and other users still get the market data that they are familiar with but the cost of delivery of that data is substantially reduced. To make further reductions, alternative lower cost data sources can be incorporated as part of the overall package.

DTS’s real-time data transfer protocol

Comet/Ajax quotelist application

Our Java based historical and real-time charting solutions

DTS’s Web Services solutions

Both Comet/Ajax and Java market news display and database systems.

In addition to that DTS has one of the most extensive historical market databases of financial data available. We can incorporate that historical database as part of any solution you wish to consider building and the cost per user for access to this extremely high quality historical data will be substantially more economical that that which is included in the “Big 2” desktop solutions.

We have also developed some very highly sophisticated yield curve analysis solutions in both 2D and 3D that enable users to analyze historical data in extremely flexible formats.

Go back to list of ways DTS can help save your costs.