BMLL adds Canadian data amid global expansion strategy

London-based market data provider BMLL has integrated data from stock exchanges in multiple countries this year, furthering the global expansion that followed its $26 million Series B investment late last year. 

This December, data from major Canadian trading venues and exchanges—including the Toronto Stock Exchange, Nasdaq Canada and the Canadian Securities Exchange—became available to a host of BMLL clients, ranging from banks to asset managers and hedge funds. Before that, the company announced that it had full-depth data from stock exchanges in China, following the additions of data from South Africa’s Johannesburg Stock Exchange and A2X Markets, Asia-Pacific data from Japanese and Singaporean exchanges, as well as the Australian Securities Exchange. 

With more jurisdictions on the horizon, the integration of Canadian exchange data is a “big deal,” BMLL CEO Paul Humphrey tells WatersTechnology. “We had a gaping hole in our roadmap the size of a continent. Canada is extremely fragmented, so we wanted to onboard all those venues at full depth.” 

BMLL’s data expansion was prompted by a decision last year to grow from a European and US business to a global one, which greatly increased its data workload. The company “harmonizes” vast quantities of raw exchange data by cleaning and standardizing it into a set format, allowing users to potentially glean insights faster. The data obtained from the exchanges is meticulously detailed, containing the end-of-day packet capture of every raw message from the exchange, including canceled and corrected messages. 

Humphrey says that due to the intensity of labor involved, only a few of the most sophisticated quant firms in the world have created such datasets for themselves.

“They’ve had armies of quants mining this data for years to enable them to have predictive insight on the market,” Humphrey says. “People believe firms like these are faster than everyone else because they’ve got bigger boxes or wider pipes—which is part of it—but it’s not the whole story. The truth is, they know what’s going to happen next because of the predictive nature of this type of data.”

Continued expansion

With Asia-Pacific, Europe and most of North America now covered in BMLL’s data integration plans, the vendor is looking at making up for existing shortfalls in coverage as opposed to tackling entire continents. 

“We’re looking at India; we want to complete coverage to Mexico, which will be a major exchange for us to onboard,” Humphrey explains. “The Middle East and North Africa region, Tadawul in Saudi Arabia—anywhere we can get full coverage is where we will aim for. Then there will be certain exchanges where we will be looking to plug the gaps.”

Brad Bailey, research director at Burton-Taylor International Consulting, says BMLL is catering to greater demand for more granular data. The pursuit of these more detailed datasets has been enabled by firms like BMLL leveraging cloud technology to deliver information in manageable formats. 

“It wasn't too long ago that in order to be sent tick-by-tick data, you'd be sent a massive disk,” Bailey says. “The cloud allows you to build very robust and accessible and usable datasets. People used to be happy with hourly or minutes data because of the size of tick datasets, but with the cloud offering, you have more and more people who are able to access that full tick dataset. As firms develop new trading strategies, they're always looking for new markets.”

Bailey says BMLL's expansion strategy follows the industry trend of continually adding to the length and breadth of existing datasets. He says covering smaller exchange environments beyond those in the US, Europe, and Asia-Pacific regions enables customers not working in those areas to build more complete datasets and helps people working in those markets conduct better analyses.

“Nobody is ever asking for less data,” Bailey says. “Data is throttled differently, but watching the evolution of BMLL, it would make sense that they keep going into different markets, and I think there's been a strong demand for these kinds of datasets.”  

Also on the agenda for 2024 is filling out BMLL’s coverage of other asset classes beyond equities—and, specifically, futures. The data provider has pre-existing partnerships with CME, Intercontinental Exchange, and Eurex across every asset class available to BMLL customers in one format. Humphrey says that by standardizing this cross-asset coverage in-house, the resulting data can save firms valuable time when it comes to extracting value.   

“It's worth saying that 80% of a quant's time is spent gathering, scrubbing, and organizing data, and—if you're lucky—20% of their time doing something useful with it,” Humphrey says. “We save our clients the 80%.”