The gargantuan Tick History dataset dating back to 1996 offers the breadth and depth of Refinitiv’s tick data covering over the counter (OTC) and exchange-traded instruments from all asset classes in over 500 venues.

Catalina Vazquez, proposition director, Tick History at Refinitiv says to Finextra Research: “What we’re doing is changing the paradigm, we’re bringing the compute to the data rather than the data to the compute.”

Because the data does not need to be moved or loaded into a separate analytics engine, it can be analysed in-situ, cutting down precious time in an industry where seconds make or break deals.

Vazquez points to the Global Algorithmic Trading Market report which suggests that by 2020, around 90% of public market trades in the US will be traded by quantitative means.

“The system will provide users access to tick history with greater speed and improved testing tools. This means the user is spending less time trying to access the data so that they can spend more time extracting insights from the data.”

In the case of quant research and trading, users looking for trading signals within historical data can extract data and leverage analytical capabilities that BigQuery offers with speed.

The cost efficiencies of the platform shouldn’t be overlooked either, notes Vazquez: “It’s important to ensure that your data scientists, a very expensive resource, aren’t waiting long periods of time for the requested data or having to cleanse the data unnecessarily. This means they can focus on driving insights.”

A 2019 survey by Refinitiv found that “as cloud adoption in financial services evolves, companies are finding that the benefits are not just about cost efficiencies but also to do with resilience, agility and innovation.” Further, 64% of firms surveyed said the cloud will become “significant, or transformational, for their sector over the next five to 10 years.”

“Customers are moving away from manual trading and there is a need to extract data that provides a competitive edge. By accessing the Refinitiv Tick History through the cloud, users are now able to look at data points that before would not have even been considered.

“Tick history remains one of the leading data sets in terms of generating benchmarks against alternative datasets which are being used, for example, on the buy side,” Vazquez concludes.