Navigating the Market Data Landscape: Tips for Efficient Portfolio Management

Navigating the Market Data landscape and ensuring your portfolio is up to date with the latest industry trends, and ensuring your portfolio is optimized to deliver the best insights and value is a daily commitment. Ensuring there is minimal overlap in your firm’s portfolio and negotiating each renewal to ensure you have the best products at the best price requires industry insights and dataset analysis. At Concertiv, we know firsthand how managing a market data portfolio can be a complex task, but there are several considerations that can help you to effectively manage your portfolio to ensure that you are getting the most value from your market data providers.

Here are some tips for efficient navigation:

Identify your data needs

It's important to clearly identify your data needs and ensure that you are getting the right data to meet those needs. Determine what data you need, how often you need it, and how you will use it, and who will need access to it.  By defining business objectives, identifying relevant data categories and data requirements, engaging stakeholders, and meeting data integration needs, you can create a framework to assess both the current information requests, and those procured earlier.

Budget and cost considerations

Analyze the budget and cost implications associated with your market data needs.Consider the pricing model of data vendors, ongoing subscription costs, potential data usage fees, and any implementation or integrations costs.Determine the budget allocation for acquiring and maintaining the required data and review the actual spend monthly.

Regulatory and compliance considerations

Consider any regulatory requirements that impact your market data needs. Ensure that the selected data sources and vendor comply with relevant regulations, data privacy laws, and security standards. Evaluate third party vendor certifications if required.

Negotiate contracts

Negotiate contracts with your data providers to ensure that you are getting the best possible pricing and service level agreements. Work with your providers to establish clear expectations for data delivery, support, and quality control.Maintain strong relationships with market data vendors to stay up to date with their new product offerings and limitations. Regularly review vendor performance, address issues promptly, and conduct contract negotiations to ensure favorable pricing, contractual terms, and service level agreements.

Optimize and monitor usage

Optimize your usage of market data to minimize costs and maximize value. Consider consolidating data providers, removing duplicate delivery of the same data set, and evaluating low usage to reduce unwanted costs.

Monitor your usage of market data to ensure that you understand the demand side of the cost equation.  Analyze the patterns and associated costs that your end users may have for certain market data providers.  Identify unused or underutilized data feeds and consider discontinuing or renegotiating contracts to optimize costs. Implementing a monitoring mechanism to track data consumption may take some investment of time and resources, but it will help to avoid unnecessary expenses, as the markets fluctuate, and opportunities adapt to those conditions.

For effective portfolio management, taking these initiatives to regularly review and reassess your firm’s market data needs ensures alignment with evolving business objectives and industry trends. Engagement in the regular monitoring of the data landscape and technology advancements not only optimizes your market data strategy over time, but also helps to achieve a higher probability of cost efficiency. By following these considerations, you can effectively manage your market data portfolio and ensure that you are getting the most value from your market data spend.

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