Powered by Xignite's platform, the expanded Mass Download is free of charge to premier subscribers of Nasdaq Data-On-Demand.

Aimed at high-frequency trading firms looking to back test strategies, the service provides users with customised data sets from the terabytes of stock trade and quote information generated every year by US stock exchanges.

Users can download large files including up to three years of historical stock trade and quote data and customise by selecting the ticker symbols, data fields, dates and times needed.

Xignite says that, unlike legacy services providing custom trades and quotes, its offering is completely automated, incurring no delays due to manual handling. Nasdaq customers can use the Web interface to select the custom data sets they want and then schedule them to be generated when they want.

Data can even be directly delivered to an application running on the cloud and customers can request data sets directly from their own software applications using the system's API.

Brian Hyndman, SVP, global data products, Nasdaq OMX, says: "The ability to get customised data sets automatically is more than just a convenience. It's a competitive advantage for high frequency trading firms, quant shops, algorithmic traders or anyone who needs to back test trading strategies."