Opening Cross: All Good Things Must Come to An End

Take, for example, the nine-year arrangement between CME Group and Brazilian exchange BM&F Bovespa to distribute each other’s data and to provide order-routing access to each other’s markets via direct connectivity between the two exchanges. As of end of day on Friday, Oct. 28, this facility was no longer available to trading firms in each country wanting to access data on the other’s market. A CME spokesperson says the cross-border link is no longer needed, as each has been able to grow their presence and build liquidity in their respective products, and because an unspecified “significant number” of customers have transitioned to other ways of accessing the Brazil data, including establishing direct presences in BM&F’s co-location datacenter.

Another thing that has come to an end is YCharts founder Shawn Carpenter’s tenure as chief executive of the vendor, having passed the reins to former president of low-latency trading infrastructure provider 7Ticks Sean Brown, allowing Carpenter to focus on his latest venture, a sales automation platform dubbed RepIQ. 

“Shawn is an entrepreneur and really enjoys the early stages of identifying a problem and then building the team to provide a solution,” Brown says. Carpenter started the company and led it through significant growth in terms of content collection and market penetration, including raising $14.5 million in investment from Morningstar and Reed Elsevier. Meanwhile, Brown joined 7Ticks as a $30 million company that was “plateauing and facing numerous business challenges,” but where he oversaw 15 percent growth over two years across overall revenue and per-customer revenue.

Also coming to an end—or, at least, in measured decline—are exchange policies that adhere to the old “bums on seats” terminal-based pricing model, as is evident at the London Stock Exchange Group, based on its third-quarter financial results. The exchange has for some time been moving towards more of an enterprise-based licensing model, and is seeing the fruits of this as its information services revenues increased by double-digits in Q3, despite a decrease in the number of terminals receiving LSE’s real-time data.

Finally, I’d like to pay tribute to Inside Reference Data editor Michael Shashoua, who is moving on to pastures new after seven years at Incisive Media, first as deputy editor of my old stomping ground Sell-Side Technology (then Dealing With Technology), then for five years as editor of IMD sister publication Inside Reference Data. Ever-precise and diligent, Michael will be missed, and we wish him every success in his future endeavors.

The timing is bittersweet: November’s print issue of IRD will be the last in its present form, as will the Nov. 21 print issue of IMD. But we’re not going anywhere: the websites will remain the same, and the two newsletters will be combined into a glossy monthly magazine, to be called Inside Data Management, packed full of the same news and exclusive insights you’ve come to expect from our publications, plus more in-depth features and analysis. It’s a big change, and we aim to deliver big things.

And while all good things must end, that doesn’t mean they can’t return even better than before with the next meal, bottle of wine or family visit. Because just like the CME-BM&F data and order-routing arrangement, or like Brown replacing Carpenter at YCharts, or merging two publications into one, the end of one era is merely the start of another, and bidding farewell to one opportunity is simply an opportunity to welcome something new.