The Cloud-based service means asset managers and hedge funds can get faster access to data for new quant initiatives and spend more time testing strategies, optimizing portfolios and managing risk.
Building on its commitment towards consumption of its financial data in the Cloud, Refinitiv, formerly the Financial and Risk business of Thomson Reuters (NYSE:TRI), has announced that it has launched its quantitative analytics platform QA Direct in the Cloud through Microsoft Azure.
QA Direct in the Cloud builds upon the QA Direct platform, offering a scalable platform to manage, maintain and integrate quantitative analysis and investment data. The platform delivers the largest repository of financial data along with quantitative alpha models and other third party content sets allowing customers to explore how their investment hypothesis performs under a broad range of market conditions.
With QA Direct in the Cloud, Quants can spend more time developing and testing investment strategies, optimizing portfolios and managing risk, as they are freed from the burden of managing and operating their data infrastructure themselves. QA Direct in the Cloud provides customers with quicker on-boarding, faster delivery of updates, removes cost associated with servers and database maintenance, and is scalable to meet customers’ performance requirements. The platform integrates and delivers a huge range of global market and referential data in one standardized database with a unified symbology – all with the flexibility and security of a single Cloud platform.
The ability to leverage more disparate data sets than ever before to develop new and differentiated investment strategies has become critical to achieving alpha for fund managers, with speed of access becoming an increasing issue to remain competitive in the market” said Pradeep Menon, Managing Director, Investing & Advisory at Refinitiv. “Cloud access for investment managers has become a business imperative; in a recent survey, over 90% of firms said they will use the public Cloud for the majority of their market data needs in less than four years. QA Direct in the Cloud allows clients to combine their own proprietary data with data concorded by Refinitiv to deliver the comprehensive, timely and accurate analysis required.
Investment strategies are only as effective as the content and analytics used to inform them” added Janet Lewis, Vice President, financial services at Microsoft Corp. “Microsoft Azure allows Refinitiv to open up a world of data to its customers in a fraction of time. What used to take two to three weeks now happens in a few days. This will enable users to research new quant initiatives faster and focus more time on research.
With QA Direct in the Cloud, Refinitiv handles continuous content updates in the QA Direct database 24/7, ensuring system availability and resiliency and removing the admin burden from customers. Proprietary data can also be integrated to sit along Refinitiv content including Datastream Pricing (Equity & Index), I/B/E/S Estimates, Worldscope fundamentals, and StarMine Models.
QA Direct can be easily linked to statistical and portfolio optimization software packages, such as SAS, Matlab, R and S-PLUS. Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) compatibility also allows easy links to statistical packages and modern programming languages such as Python and C#. QA Direct in the Cloud uses Azure SQL Database, all contracted through Refinitiv.