Most Innovative Market Data Project: Exegy

The win in this category by Exegy marks a double-header for the company in this year’s Inside Market Data & Inside Reference Data Awards, with the other win in the Best Real Time Data Initiative category. While both awards recognize the innovativeness of the company’s newly launched trading signals service, Signum, the award for Most Innovative Market Data Project is for the company’s collaborative work with clients in developing the service.

Exegy has provided technology to the market data
industry for 13 years, and its roots go back further to when it was founded as a technology start-up at the School of Engineering at Washington University in St Louis in 2003. In 2006, the company launched a field-programmable gate array-based ticker plant that normalizes and distributes real-time market data to trading applications. 

“When we brought that to market, we made some decisions that really play into the way we are rolling out Signum today,” says David Taylor, CTO at Exegy. “We essentially wanted to deliver all of the value of the technology without exposing any of the complexity. This meant deploying the ticker plant as a managed service and giving clients a software application program interface to consume the data that came out of it. This was a successful model and we had early adoption by banks’ principal trading desks.” 

Since then, the company has expanded its product line and grown its client base to include market-makers, sell-side banks, asset managers and proprietary traders. More recently, clients began talking to Exegy about the possibility of the company applying data science and machine learning to develop trading signals and delivering them as a fully managed solution. “A lot of the demand came from our sell-side clients who said they wanted these tools to improve execution quality and reduce risk, but didn’t have the resources to do the data science and build them into their infrastructure. They were looking for a Signals-as-a-Service offering and saw that as our strength,” says Taylor.

Exegy has spent more than two years developing Signum’s trading signals in concert with several of its largest clients, and the offerings have now entered an early adopter evaluation phase, with clients carrying out their own integration work and test cycles to bring the signals into production. 

The current set of Signum signals for the US equities markets includes Signum Liquidity Lamp, for real-time detection of reserve or iceberg order types; Signum Searchlight, for estimation of reserve order volume; Signum Quote Fuse, for predictions of price durations; and Signum Quote Vector, for next-tick direction. As a managed solution, Exegy delivers reports on signal performance to users via a web portal. 

Read more about the Inside Market Data & Inside Reference Data Awards 2019 winners