Big Data for Finance

BNY Mellon Report Explores Big Data in Finance, in the 21st Century

A report recently published by BNY Mellon - it's available to anyone who request it from them - takes a look at big data, its definition and its potential, and "sketches its transformational influence on the 21st century global financial system, mainly from an asset management perspective."

Wipro Pumps $30 Million Into Opera Solutions

Indian IT heavyweight Wipro has invested $30 million in New Jersey-based predictive analytics specialist Opera Solutions. It's unclear what this values Opera at, but Wipro's investment is a minority stake.

MPPs in Play: Actian Grabs ParAccel; EMC Launches Pivotal

The world of massively parallel processing (MPP) databases just got more interesting with Actian's acquisition of ParAccel, and the formal launch of EMC's Pivotal offspring, which draws heavily on the capabilities of the company's Greenplum unit and its MPP database.

Continuum Analytics Provides Python Insight into Thomson Reuters Databases

Continuum Analytics is providing access to Thomson Reuters' QADirect data offering via Wakari, its browser-based Python data analytics platform. Python is an open source computer language that was first released in 1991, and which has grown in popularity in part because of its emphasis on code readability and compactness. A number of financial markets participants are known to be using or evaluating it.

NYSE Technologies to Distribute SMA Social Media Sentiment Analytics

NYSE Technologies has teamed with Chicago's Social Market Analytics (SMA) to distribute the latter's sentiment statistics, derived from social media, via its SFTI Network and its SuperFeed consolidated data feed.

SMA’s engine extracts, evaluates and calculates data in real-time to attempt to generate directional and volatility indications on individual stocks, ETFs, sectors, and indices by measuring the level and quality of social media interactions on social media sources relative to historical levels.

Founded by former Thomson Reuters execs, SMA taps into the twitter 'firehose' and calculates so-called S-Factors.  These include scores that not only indicate positive or negative views, but place a value on the level of sentiment, about a stock or a market.

Big Data Bytes: EMC, Actian, IBM, ParAccel, MapR

The first big data roundup in 2013 ...

* EMC has released an enhanced version of its EMC Greenplum Data Computing Appliance, featuring a redesign that provides greater than 70% performance gains over the prior generation for data loading and scanning, and 100% performance increases for concurrent query workloads.

Q&A: Panopticon's Willem De Geer on (Big) Data Visualisation in Capital Markets

When discussing big data, the point is often made that deriving value from the data, through analytics, is where the real business win is. Panopticon Software has been in the analysis business - specifically data visualisation - since before big data was a common term. So we found out more about the company, and how it is involved in the capital markets, from its managing director, Willem De Geer.

Q: How did Panopticon Software get its start, and what is its focus?

A: Development of Panopticon visual analysis tools began in 1999 at an emerging market brokerage, Brunswick Direct. The CTO, Sam Giertz, was facing a difficult challenge: how to efficiently deliver quality information on thousands of financial instruments in over 30 markets in a very short period of time. Giertz wanted his clients to be able to make sense of huge volumes of information quickly and then be able to make informed investment decisions based on that information.

DCM Capital Taps Social Media For Sentiment Trading

London-based hedge fund-turned-trading and technology vendor DCM Capital has released DCM Dealer, a retail trading platform for CFD (Contract For Difference) and spreadbetting, incorporating sentiment ratings derived from Twitter and Facebook updates.

Amazon Taps ParAccel MPP for Redshift Data Warehouse

Amazon Web Services' recently-announced Redshift data warehouse service is making use of ParAccel's massively parallel processing columnar database technology, which is designed for analytic workloads.  Amazon is marrying ParAccel to its infrastructure as a service offering, providing a scalable and fully managed service.

Infinigon Group Generating Realtime Trading Signals From Twitter

New York City-based Infinigon Group is emerging from stealth mode and is working with select trading firms to test their software, which provides trading signals by analysing Twitter activity in real time.