Quodd Bows Own Ticker, Preps Depth Feed

Jersey City, NJ-based data display vendor Quodd Financial Information Services has completed the rollout of initial datasets onto its new ticker plant, and is planning to add full market depth data in the coming months, to support provision of datafeeds in addition to its Quodd Equity+ data terminal, officials say.

Quodd rolled out the ticker plant in November, and is already using it to provide datafeeds to one brokerage client, with others currently trialing the ticker plant, says Quodd chairman and chief executive Dennis Cassidy. Since then, the vendor has added data on exchange-traded funds, real-time and delayed data from the IntercontinentalExchange, and Canadian indexes to its initial coverage of equity price data from North American exchanges.

As well as using the data consolidated via the ticker plant in Equity+, the moves mean that the vendor can now offer more data services than it previously could when populating its terminals with a datafeed from Interactive Data, because Quodd can now provide datafeeds directly to clients, which it could not offer before, Cassidy says.

In addition to providing Level 1 and Level 2 datafeeds, Cassidy says the vendor will also begin providing full depth of book data for US exchanges -- starting with the New York Stock Exchange, Nasdaq and Direct Edge -- in the second quarter of this year, to target firms with large numbers of traders.

In another move that should help target larger firms with high infrastructure costs, the vendor is now building cross-connects to NYSE Technologies' SFTI (Secure Financial Transaction Infrastructure) network, to allow clients to access feeds and displays managed from Quodd's datacenters in Hawthorne, NY and at Xand's TekPark facility in Breinigsville, PA -- to which Quodd migrated its backup datacenter from Houston, TX in December -- via their existing connections to SFTI. "Firms need to be on SFTI to access systems [on the New York Stock Exchange floor]... and they are already paying for SFTI," Cassidy says.

For Quodd, the process of rolling out its own ticker plant took longer than originally envisaged -- not just building the UltraCache server software for capturing, normalizing and integrating data, but sourcing and integrating additional datasets required to support the equities data, such as fundamental data and corporate actions, sourced from Zacks Investment Research and Mergent -- which delayed other planned projects. For example, the vendor is now able to turn its attention to building mobile versions of its Equity+ display application for Blackberry smartphones, and for Apple's iPhone and iPad devices, which Cassidy says should be ready in about three months.

"When people log into Equity+ at home, they see the same display as on their work desktop -- and we want to be able to do that for the iPad, so users will have access to everything that they are already entitled to, but on their iPad," he says.