Best Market Data Newcomer (Vendor or Product): Barchart

With a cut-throat market and low margins, firms are on a constant hunt for original investment opportunities, which in recent years has led to an increased demand for unique data sources. Whether real-time data for cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin, or indexes for corn in Iowa, this year’s Best Market Data Newcomer has its finger on the pulse and is ready to make its move. Chicago‑headquartered Barchart has come out on top following timely product releases, positioning itself as a relevant vendor with a unique portfolio of data products.

While not a newcomer to the market, Barchart has seen continued growth since its establishment in 1995 with just a handful of employees, and has this year made its mark on the awards by winning the Best Real-Time Market Data Initiative award for its cryptocurrency feed in addition to the Best Market Data Newcomer award. Mark Haraburda, CEO at Barchart, says the vendor now has a “top‑to‑bottom market data offering,” and has grown into a fully fledged vendor with multi-asset class market data coverage.

The client base spans financial firms, media outlets and technology companies. Barchart was chosen by trading technology firm Nelogica, for example, as its market data vendor. Nelogica takes Barchart data to provide its platform users with real-time CME Group and US equities price data. Haraburda says Barchart provides market data to industry software vendors—such as firms offering trading software, technical analysis, order execution or risk management models. “With our data management model, users can focus on software instead of data,” he says, explaining that leveraging Barchart is also typically cost-efficient for software vendors, as Barchart then takes care of complexities such as exchange licensing.

Another growth area for Barchart has been alternative data, and last year it expanded its cryptocurrency coverage with a new feed, and announced a partnership with Brave New Coin for news and content. With the new feed, Barchart provides access to the most popular digital coins available as index values across multiple exchanges, or specific pricing per exchange via its different product offerings—Streaming for real-time and OnDemand for cloud‑based market data application programming interfaces available through web services. 

For cryptocurrencies, Barchart provides a data feed consolidated from numerous crypto exchanges, and Haraburda says the plan going forward is for Barchart to create more new content in-house—starting with the agricultural market, including corn and soybeans. In addition, Barchart is packaging market data into stylized formats and developing financial data displays for media outlets. “That’s an area we’re really excited about,” Haraburda says.

Read more about the IMD/IRD Awards 2018 winners