Market data opens up June 3, 2008
Posted by James Webster in : finance , add a commentAustralia isn’t the only place where an incumbent exchange is feeling the heat from upstart competitors.
In the US, Nasdaq OMX has launched a ‘free-of-charge real-time market data service’ (via Matt). This will be distributed by Google Finance plus other news sources.
Meanwhile the small-but-growing ECN BATS Trading (which will soon be competing against European bourses) last week announced that it will be distributing
real-time market data via Yahoo! Finance.
Nothing from the NYSE so far. Both of these moves are targeted at retail investors, the hefty annual fees that institutional buy-side and sell-side players pay to exchanges, ECNs and data providers like Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg are not going away any time soon. The data is also fairly basic, just the last price at which a trade took place so no free access to the Level 2 data that is essential to read a trend in market movements.
What would be interesting however is if both BATS and Nasdaq open up some form of API or streaming/ticking market data access to retail investors… both Google and Yahoo are big fans of web services so I would say it is almost certain they will integrate this into their existing APIs. Xignite, a smaller player in financial web services and data, are also part of the NASDAQ Last Sale launch. I would be surprised if these services offered anything other than synchronous pull style requests… a streaming, asynchronous push (via Comet perhaps?) mechanism would be very cool.
A few other links surrounding market data and open-ness: