Democratizing Market Data and Making it Affordable- Part Two
You can read Part One here.
The first on my list is algoseek. algoseek’s mission is to make market data affordably accessible by removing the bottlenecks found in other vendors. As a service provider and data partner, they help their clients unlock the value in data. To this end, they have adopted value-based pricing to provide the license type and Service Level Agreement matched to different clients’ needs.
algoseek was founded by Chris and Yuri Poliukhovich. After a decade of developing high-frequency trading systems, Chris and Yuri felt the pain of sourcing high-quality data for research and backtesting. Data from top vendors was like an expensive house with a marvelous façade but rudimentary inside, full of missing, broken pieces upon close inspection.
As a “fair price” provider, algoseek is built upon modern infrastructure. So when you purchase their data, you don’t need to pay for the high-maintenance overheads and costly transformation of outdated infrastructure. You pay only for the data you bought as well as their world-class services and SLA guarantees.
Another vendor that is committed to making market data accessible and affordable is Intrinio. Founder and CEO, Rachel Carpenter once told me “We love plugging in and powering innovation! Keeping it affordable, easy, data should be accessible to everyone.” And that’s exactly what Intrinio has been doing for almost a decade now. Intrinio wants to speed up the traditional, restrictive way of doing market data.
And this piece won’t be complete if I don’t mention Databento. I spoke with their ambitious CEO, Christina Qi, who together with her illustrious team, is dedicated to making market data available to everybody on a pay-as-you-use basis. These guys are literally making it possible for clients to purchase financial market data like a utility. Databento eliminates tens of thousands in upfront data expenses per dataset, while giving you the instant flexibility to pick up real-time full exchange feeds or terabytes of historical data when you need it. This is a radical idea.
For the sake of space, the last market data vendor we’ll look at in this piece s Polygon.io. Founded in 2016 by Quinton Pike, Polygon.io is a market data provider with a mission to help developers build the future of FinTech by democratizing access to the world’s financial data. The team at Polygon.io sets out to handle the heavy lifting for developers so they can spend less time worrying about data and more time creating applications.
I know there are many other vendors devoted to making market data accessible and affordable. Apart from the ones already discussed, other honorable mentions are Tickdata, dxFeed, and even Yahoo Finance.
In conclusion, obtaining accurate, reliable, financial market data is incredibly difficult. Getting that data into a consistent and easy-to-use format is even more so. Owing to the factors already discussed in the first part of this article, it’s no secret that the financial market data industry has been slower than most to innovate and break free of bottlenecks and barriers. However, things are changing. Many data vendors are taking up the challenge by powering innovations and democratizing market data through modern data technologies. That means automating the data supply chain with advanced infrastructure and machine learning, delivering high-quality data through cutting-edge tools designed for developers and engineers, and getting it all in the hands of people who are challenging the system.
