What is investment data?

Detailed summary

Explore how institutional teams leverage investment data, low-latency colocation, machine-readable news, and trading surveillance to optimize strategy execution and prevent market abuse.

Investment data is information used to evaluate assets, markets, companies, transactions or portfolios. It can include prices, financial statements, economic indicators, corporate events, news, alternative data and metadata such as timestamps or identifiers. News is one component of investment data, not the whole category.

Investment teams use investment data for research, valuation, portfolio construction, risk management, trading, performance analysis and regulatory or operational workflows. Quantitative teams may use it to build signals, test models and monitor market events.

Data is collected from one or more sources, normalized, time-stamped, tagged and delivered through files, feeds, APIs or platforms. Firms often combine news and other text with prices, orders, fundamentals and reference data; the usefulness of the result depends on coverage, quality, timing, licensing and the intended use.

Asset managers, hedge funds, investment banks, wealth managers, analysts, portfolio managers, quantitative researchers, traders, data engineers and risk or compliance teams use investment data.

Colocation is the practice of placing trading or data-processing infrastructure in the same facility as a market venue or data-delivery infrastructure. Shorter physical network distances combined with the use of specialized hardware reduce transmission time.Colocation does not guarantee the fastest data transfer.

Market makers, systematic traders and other latency-sensitive firms typically use colocation to receive data and send orders with less network delay. Firms who are trying to conduct trades in sub-second timing find it advantageous to make trades closest to where the information is distributed, avoiding long physical distances and hops from one system to another.

A firm deploys servers or network equipment in a hosting facility and connects them to the relevant market or data infrastructure.

Electronic market makers, hedge funds, proprietary trading firms, quantitative teams…

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Opening of the article, excerpted from Dow Jones Newswires. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.