Architects of Electronic Trading: Technology Leaders Who Are Shaping Today's Financial Markets

CHAPTER 15

Big Data, Big Opportunities

In this chapter, David Siegel, Alan Choyna, and Clara Bonaccorsi of Bottom Line Metrics discuss the challenges posed by Big Data and how firms are using data to gain an edge in a variety of ways, such as the possibility to engage in more targeted marketing, better track customer behavior, recognize patterns, determine correlations between new data sets, and even perform superior business analytics. Across a variety of applications, insightful analysis of data is helping firms create an improved context for their decision-making. And putting data in the context of business challenges is a key determinant in how successful companies are in exploiting data.*

Arguably, financial market participants should be at an advantage in terms of data analysis, as deriving value from data has long been an important determinant of success in trading and investment. While massive amounts of data certainly are not unique to financial markets, the typical number of systems to which market participants connect complicates the problem of data management.

Big Data is a buzzword, but it refers to a very real challenge shared across industries. Today, people and systems produce more data than ever before. A report on Big Data by CRC cites various sources that predict that some customers will be storing multiple petabytes of data by 2020.† While some data is structured, much of the new data that is generated, like social media data, falls into the unstructured category, ...