Options PIPE clients now have access to Tick Data products for analyzing global, multi-asset class market trends and back-testing trading strategies. Tick Data provides research-ready historical intraday time series data for the world's equities, futures and options markets. Options IT provides on-demand Private Financial Cloud services-including ultra-low latency market data, connectivity and fully optimized application hosting services-to the banking, trading, and traditional and alternative investment community.

The agreement comes as the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission is reported to be preparing a proposal to require backtesting on automated trading strategies before they go live in the market.

"We're delighted to work with Tick Data to provide our clients access to its full suite of historical market data," said Nigel Kneafsey, CEO of Options IT. "Given that regulators are now looking at how well trading firms scrutinize their automated trading strategies before live deployment, using a service like Tick Data's is not only a best industry practice, but potentially a required one."

Neal Falkenberry, SVP at Tick Data, said, "The highly volatile global markets of the past few years have generated many trading opportunities, but may also lead to increased regulatory scrutiny of trading activities. Tick Data's historical intraday market data products have always allowed our clients to reliably develop and test trading algorithms. We are happy to work with Options IT to offer a new way to access our research-ready data."