ComStock Looks for Institutional Gains

Inside Market Data
November 28, 2005

Interactive Data's ComStock division is hoping that changes to its newly-relaunched PlusFeed (formerly known as XpressFeed) real-time datafeed will help it gain more traction among financial institutions as well as with data and software vendors who redistribute ComStock's data.

And though a continuing trend is the move by user firms towards direct exchange feeds for algorithmic trading purposes, recently-appointed ComStock president Mark Hepsworth believes consolidated feeds will still appeal to firms who want contributed as well as exchange data, and a wider geographical coverage than one exchange at a time.

Another reason that Hepsworth wants to focus more on selling to institutions is that the market is moving more towards data usage in applications, while terminal counts are expected to decline, he says.
The split between users and vendors as customers for PlusFeed is currently around 50-50, according to Hepsworth, though he says selling direct to institutions is now proving to be the biggest growth area for ComStock.

Hepsworth says ComStock has been preparing for an institutional push for the last year, but first had to make changes to the feed to appeal more to an institutional user base. These included making sure that the feed had a wide geographical coverage of exchanges, which ComStock has added in recent years.

ComStock also felt it necessary to add more contributed data to the feed, from the GTIS division of Interactive Data. Hepsworth estimates there are now around 350 sources on PlusFeed, with around 200 exchanges and 150 sources of contributed data from GTIS.

"In the year to date on GTIS, we have added around 25 sources, a lot of them around foreign exchange and about widening the range of exotic currencies we have, and also official rates from central banks," Hepsworth says. "We've also had a push to add more execution-quality data for the more common currencies," he says.
It is also now easier for users to interface to the feed, following the introduction of a C++ API around a year ago. "It's one thing going to a vendor… who is used to parsing data, but institutions are looking for more API integration," he says.