Stock Market Data

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Category: Stock Market Report

In finance, Stock Market Data refers to quote and trade related-data associated with equity, fixed-income, financial derivatives, currency, and other investment instruments. The term market data traditionally refers to numerical price data, reported from trading venues, such as stock exchanges. The price data is attached to a ticker symbol and additional data about the trade. The latest prices quotes moving in LED ribbons around the walls of trading floors or at the bottom of the screen on financial TV shows are familiar sights. This price data is not only used in real time to make on-the-spot decisions about buying or selling, but historical market data (see graph at right) is also used to project pricing trends and to calculate market risk on portfolios of investments that may be held by an individual or an institutional investor.

In actuality, the above example is an aggregation of different sources of data, as quote data (bid, ask, bid size, ask size) and trade data (last sale, last size, volume) are often generated over different data feeds. Delivery of price data from exchanges to users, such as traders, is highly time-sensitive, approaching real-time. Specialized technologies called ticker plants are software (lately combined with field programmable gate array processors), designed to handle collection and throughput of massive data streams, displaying prices for traders and feeding computerized trading systems fast enough to capture opportunities before markets change. When stored, historical market data is also called time-series data, because it requires a specialized type of database that enables retrieval of a series prices over time for a single instrument.

While stock market data generally refers to real time or delayed price quotations, the term increasingly includes static or reference data—i.e. any type of data related to securities that is not changing in real time. Reference data includes identifier codes (e.g. CUSP), the exchange a security trades on, end-of-day pricing, name and address of the issuing company, the terms of the security (such as interest rate and maturity on a bond), and the outstanding corporate actions (such as pending stock splits or proxy votes) related to the security. This type of data can be maintained in a relational database. Databases that maintain the references data for holdings in a portfolio are known as "securities master" files.