Dow Jones is looking to cash in on the rising popularity of algorithmic trading with the launch of a data feed that delivers news items in XML format which can be rapidly processed by electronic trading programs.
Dow Jones says its new Elementized News Feed delivers data directly to quantitative-analysis models and automated trading programs and is designed for both buy and sell side firms involved in algorithmic trading, quantitative analysis and execution management.
The ultra-low-latency service delivers economic and corporate news in precise and discrete elements in XML-tagged fields. This eliminates the need to parse unstructured text, allowing trading models and computer programs to process, interpret and take action on breaking news in milliseconds.
Dennis Cahill, SVP and chief product officer, Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group, says the new feed "revolutionises how news can be analysed and acted upon by market participants, while giving our clients the best possible news input for their proprietary models".
Cahill says the feed enables proprietary traders, hedge funds and quantitative analysts "to make trading, investing and hedging decisions with minimum latency and maximum security".
The feed provides data elements for all key economic indicators from major countries and will cover public firms in the US and UK. The service also includes an archive of more than three years of 'elementised' news for back-testing and statistical analysis of news flow and historical market reactions.
In December, UK news and information group Reuters launched two products that allow its streaming news and data output to be used for the purposes of automated and algorithmic trading.
The products are designed to enable computers to recognise and process key items of data in Reuters news stories, allowing customers to incorporate the information into automated trading strategies.
In a separate move financial data vendor Interactive Data has announced plans to launch a low latency direct exchange data service in the second quarter of 2007.
The managed DirectPlus service is designed to provide customers with access to sub-one millisecond data for use in low latency financial applications, including algorithmic trading engines and order management systems.