Tradecenter Upgrade Features Tokyo Stock Exchange Prices

Knight-Ridder Tradecenter, the technical analysis service for equities, Treasury securities, foreign exchange and derivative instruments, is adding new data and analysis weapons to its arsenal.

After two years of talking, Knight-Ridder's Financial Information Group has struck a bargain with The Tokyo Stock Exchange to distribute price information for TSE-traded stocks via Tradecenter. The deal, which gives Tradecenter access to real-time last-trade data for all individual stocks on the TSE, comes as a real kick in the pants for other vendors, who have so far failed to gain similar access.

With the exception of Quick and Quick minority shareholder Reuters, the Tokyo Stock Exchange has been reluctant to establish distribution ties to market data vendors. Another Knight-Ridder service, Moneycenter, has been distributing prices only for the TSE's Topix index futures and selected Yen bonds.

The TSE has been particularly cautious about data feed products; even Quick's product line has been limited to packaged systems. While the Tradecenter arrangement doesn't break the rules, it may portend a more aggressive approach towards information distribution on the part of the TSE.

Tradecenter's TSE-related product development is underway at Knight-Ridder's Kansas City data center, but it will take several months to complete. One of the practical problems complicating real- time global distribution of TSE data is time- and date-stamping. Since the Japanese trading day begins during the previous evening in North America, it will be necessary to clarify dates for U.S. Tradecenter clients.

Tradecenter maintains a historical database of price, volume, and tick attributes for equities trading and similar data for on-the-run Treasury securities and foreign exchange. It also supplies calculated values such as relative strength index and money flow.

Although the database is great in size, it lacks a flexible sorting and retrieval function. Users are primarily limited to the hunt-and- peck analytical mode, using a finite selection of pre-defined calculations and displays.

Tradecenter has set out to address this deficiency by combining a relational database management system (from Sybase Inc.) with a sophisticated screening and display language developed by Los Angeles-based software house Integrated Analytics Inc.

Code-named Tradescreen, the new system combines Boolean connectors, syllogistic logic, and mathematical and statistical operators to allow users to sift through the Tradecenter database with comparative ease and speed.

The Tradescreen project team has been working with a subset of the Tradecenter database, running Sybase on Sun 3 workstations.

But Tradescreen won't be available directly to Tradecenter users. Instead, it will be used initially to create and maintain a set of new relations, lists, and screen displays, available to clients in the usual way -- through terminal emulation on microcomputers.

There are several plausible explanations for Tradecenter's decision not to provide the facility directly to customers. The common thread is control or lack of same. If access were widely distributed, it could wreak havoc on the central database management system. If the database itself were widely distributed, it could wreak havoc on the business.

On the other hand, what self-respecting dealer is willing to put a nickel in Tradecenter's slot every time it wants to perform this type of search? "No one's been able to do it as well in-house as we have out-of-house," says vice president Steven Goldstein.

That's hard to swallow. The big boys, of course, already do it for themselves. It's just possible, however, that Tradecenter's the only firm that's done it and is willing to share the results for a price.

Tradecenter did a what-if survey of its customers to identify the most popular Tradescreen relations. Examples include:

List all stocks that have declining or steady price and increasing money flow,

List all stocks with low relative strength but large money inflow, and

List all stocks with unusual volume and large money inflow.

In addition, Tradecenter will offer clients a custom request service for more abstruse exercises.

Tradecenter has been around for over five years and has an installed base of only 450 screens. But with average monthly per- screen revenue of approximately $1850.00, who's complaining? Goldstein says the Tradecenter unit has been profitable for the past two years despite stiff competition from the likes of Bridge Data and Salomon Brothers Inc. Salomon offers proprietary analytical services to institutional clients on a soft-dollar basis.