Bloomberg and Man Group Bring Data and Front-office Research Solution to Market

Bloomberg and Man Group have entered a multi-year open-source technology development and product integration agreement for ArcticDB, a new DataFrame database product according to a story in The Trade News. Python-native database, ArcticDB, was built to address the continuously increasing amount of data and complexity of front-office research at Man Group, a challenge that many large buy- and sell-side institutions face. The agreement is a first-of-its-kind transaction for Man Group and the resulting product will be implemented into Bloomberg’s BQuant offering – an analytics platform for quantitative analysts and data scientists in the financial markets to build, test and deploy models for alpha generation, risk and trading. The BQuant environment is integrated with the Bloomberg Terminal, combining Bloomberg data, services and tools with open-source technology such as Pythin and Jupyter notebooks. Each year, Man Group trades trillions of dollars of buy and sell orders which demand fast, flexible and familiar data science tools with the ability to store and process complex data at an industrial scale. ArcticDB powers use cases including deep tick history analysis and modelling of large corporate bond universes by dealing with individual data elements spanning millions of rows or thousands of columns. Using ArcticDB, Man Group’s investment professional and technologists can better power robust, near-real-time automated trading, alongside enabling point-in-time analysis of research datasets and providing functionality for signal back testing. ArcticDB’s first iteration was made available on an open-source basis via GitHub. The latest version continues an open-source approach while adding a commercial proposition through an enterprise version for production use. The latest version is designed to leverage modern cloud object storage, complement any existing data science tech stack, and can be installed with a single command.