Data Policies to ‘Trump’ Donald and Hillary

It’s easy to forget that data professionals have lives outside the world of data management. But with the US political convention season in full swing, and policy promises flying in all directions, we should remember that these folks have forgotten more about policies—data policies, that is—than most of us will ever learn.

So if I were running for President, this is a group I would specifically target. And here’s how, referencing some recent stories from Waters’ stablemate Inside Market Data: If there’s one thing less popular than politicians, it’s data fees, which continue to rise. But some in the industry are coming up with new ways to ease the burden for clients. For example, Thomson Reuters recently revealed a new way to combat fees: by adding trading capabilities from OptionsCity Software to its Eikon terminal, the vendor says user firms will be able to consolidate their activity, rather than viewing data in Eikon then using a separate system to trade—and as a result, incurring duplicate data fees plus the cost of the second software platform.

Since I’m no expert on this, I’d hire a team of data experts—after all, who better to balance budgets than the people responsible for managing their firms’ third-largest expense?—and empower these staff members to pursue better practices through innovation; to seek out and implement new datasets that will make your trading strategies great again. And if data isn’t available, my experts would find it or create it. For example, online economic and financial data platform Quandl recently added trade and volume data from foreign exchange settlement bank CLS Group to its platform—data that CLS doesn’t currently provide to the market. CLS provides similar data in monthly reports, but Quandl will collect and offer the data on a more granular and more frequent basis to help traders identify trends based on supporting volume figures for price changes.

Immediate Changes

And I would start making changes immediately—and I don’t just mean on day one in office; I mean from the very first milliseconds in the office, thanks to technologies like Metamako’s MetaMux switches, which the Australian Securities Exchange is using to provide real-time monitoring of its new trading platform, and timestamping and synchronization. Like any successful political campaign, a successful trading operation has a lot of complicated moving parts that must be accurately aligned to work properly together.

Like any successful political campaign, a successful trading operation has a lot of complicated moving parts that must be accurately aligned to work properly together.

But what prevents businesses from working properly together is the burden of regulation that hampers market participants from operating optimally and from bending the rules a little. For example, Fitch Ratings was recently fined by the European Securities and Markets Authority for disclosing information about upcoming ratings to its parent company, and for an occasion where it failed to satisfy the “12-hour requirement” around sovereign rating changes. So I say, if you want to break the rules, let’s break free from those rules entirely—just be prepared for everyone else to do the same unethical thing to you that you’re doing to them—and then we can finally have a truly level playing field.

Belittling My Campaign 

Of course, the media will no doubt just belittle my campaign, but I don’t care, because increasingly, data consumers are getting their news through channels that use technologies such as machine-learning to not only create custom feeds of news tailored to their watchlists and interests based on past activity, but also to create stories from raw data that the platforms determine that those consumers would be interested in, such as how startup Digital Contact is targeting retail brokers with custom news feeds.

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Disclaimer: Campaign promises only. Past statements are not indicators of future actions once in office. Popularity may go down as well as plummet.