In The News

Barchart Readies Professional Tools, Trading

Inside Market Data | 10 Sep 2010 | 21:58

Chicago-based data and analytics vendor Barchart is developing a new Professional-level data terminal that incorporates new capabilities, including trading and order-routing, partly to allow clients to take advantage of fee waivers for market data displayed within execution devices.

The vendor is still in the process of building and internally testing the new product - dubbed Barchart Professional - and plans to make it available for testing with clients in November and roll it out into full production by year-end.

Mark Haraburda, managing director of sales and business development at Barchart, says the vendor has an existing legacy product with the same name that it no longer actively supports, but that the new version has been completely rewritten using Java technologies and a thin-client desktop interface, which he says will make the system faster and more stable than its solely web-based displays, while also making it accessible to developers with Java experience.

"Clients wanted the ability to trade and to trade from charts, write their own studies, do simulated trading, with better options analytics, and they wanted something installed on their desktop, whereas most of our products are web-based," Haraburda says. "This will give us a product to compete with companies like eSignal, Telvent DTN and others where we may have come up short in the past-now this will put us in that space."

The new Barchart Professional will include data on commodities, futures, equities, indexes and currencies sourced from the vendor's feeds, and available in real-time, delayed, and end-of-day options. Enhancements to the data display for this version will include increased options analytics, such as the addition of theoretical values and new views, as well as the ability for users to create their own studies and displays, and to write and import trading strategies into the product for back-testing against real-time and historical market data. The product will also include an open API for developers to build their own add-on features into the platform, or to incorporate proprietary or third-party data, indicators and services within Barchart Professional.
Barchart developed the new terminal in-house, though the back-end trading capabilities are being provided by Denver, Colo.-based trading software, data and analytics vendor CQG, whose order-routing infrastructure Barchart will use to enable clients to trade on exchanges and with brokers connected to CQG.

The addition of trading capabilities will also enable users to avoid some data fees, since futures exchanges typically waive data fees for market data being displayed within a trading system rather than a view-only device-which has also made it harder in the past for Barchart to compete against trading system vendors who also provide data and analytics, Haraburda says.

"We knew for a long time that we would need to get into trading, but it has been a matter of priorities," he says, adding that the vendor needed to hire several new development staff to build the new features. "We may be late to the [trading] game, but that means we can see what others have done well and make sure we put the best features into this."