Put as simply as possible, TICK data represents the most granular layer of financial market information, capturing every individual trade and quote as they occur.
This data includes detailed records such as timestamps, transaction prices, traded volumes, and unique trade identifiers, providing a comprehensive view of market activities. Spanning over 500 global exchanges and covering more than 40 years of market history, TICK data encompasses individual orders, time and sales records, and various levels of market depth.
With a total volume exceeding 6 petabytes, TICK data is invaluable for firms aiming to optimize investment strategies, perform detailed market analyses, and enhance risk management—if they can implement the right data stack to leverage it effectively.
The Historical Challenges of Handling TICK Data
Managing TICK data presents significant challenges due to its sheer complexity and volume. Traditional systems often struggle with these massive datasets, leading to storage limitations and slow processing times.
The volume of TICK data can reach petabytes, making storage a costly affair for financial services institutions. Moreover, data silos across various departments hinder comprehensive analysis and reporting, while inefficient data pipelines make synthesizing information from multiple sources time-consuming. Analyzing data at millisecond precision further complicates matters—often requiring dedicated systems and specialized tools.
Enter Snowflake’s Cloud-native Approach to TICK Data
Migrating TICK data to the Snowflake AI Data Cloud offers several strategic advantages, including:
- Enhanced Performance: Migrating to Snowflake’s cloud-based platform enables faster data processing and real-time analytics.
- Cost Efficiency: Reduces total cost of ownership by eliminating the need for on-premises infrastructure and maintenance. Firms can save over 60% on costs related to storage, maintaining data centers, and processing by utilizing marketplace sharing on platforms like Snowflake.
- Regulatory Compliance: Simplifies adherence to complex regulations (e.g., FRTB, GDPR) through centralized data governance.
- Competitive Edge: Facilitates advanced analytics like backtesting, risk assessment, and transaction cost analysis, driving better investment decisions.
- Scalability and Flexibility: Snowflake’s architecture easily scales with growing data volumes and supports diverse workloads and user personas.
- Data Sharing and Analytics: Leading tick data providers such as FactSet, Bloomberg, LSEG, ICE, and BMLL have already transitioned their data to the cloud and are accessible via the Snowflake Marketplace.
Snowflake is also uniquely positioned to alleviate the historical challenges and pain points that accompany TICK data, including:
- Data Complexity and Volume: Traditional systems need help with the massive size and complexity of TICK data, leading to storage limitations and slow processing times.
- Data Silos: Fragmented data across different departments (front, middle, back office) hinder comprehensive analysis and reporting.
- Inefficient Data Pipelines: Legacy ETL processes are costly and time-consuming, making synthesizing and joining data from multiple sources challenging.
- Timestamp Analysis Challenges: Analyzing data at millisecond precision often requires disparate systems and specialized tools.
Driving More Efficient TICK Data Migration with Hakkōda
Drawing on deep industry experience and expertise spanning the entire Snowflake ecosystem, Hakkoda’s refactored migration approach streamlines the ingestion of TICK data to Snowflake while ensuring minimal disruption to daily operations. With the assistance of modern AI tooling, this approach automates unwieldy manual processes and eliminates traditional bottlenecks. Strategic differentiators include:
- AI Copilot Enabled Data Assessment: Evaluating existing data sources, formats, and storage systems.
- AI Copilot Enabled Pipeline Modernization: Redesigning ETL processes to leverage Snowflake’s capabilities – this can include forgoing storage for direct Snowflake Marketplace shares, as well as balancing Snowflake’s partnerships with AWS and Azure to pair off high-speed streaming needs and broader enablement
- Security and Governance Implementation: Setting up robust security protocols and compliance frameworks within Snowflake.
- Performance Optimization: Tuning data models and queries for optimal speed and efficiency.
Boosting Financial Performance with TICK Data and MAMBA
Advanced analytics are essential for financial firms aiming to improve investment decisions and enhance risk management. Hakkoda’s MAMBA accelerator empowers firms to perform transaction cost analysis (TCA), which involves assessing both explicit costs like commissions and implicit costs such as market impact and timing slippage. Pre-trade analysis in TCA includes evaluating potential costs and risks, examining liquidity, volatility, and market depth, and selecting an execution strategy before executing a trade.
The integration of AI, meanwhile, further enhances MAMBA’s research and analytics capabilities and improves financial data quality to drive better outcomes in volatile markets.
Your Competitors Know the Clock is TICKing
Migrating TICK data to Snowflake provides numerous advantages for financial services firms, addressing several key pain points, including the storage and processing challenges associated with the sheer volume and complexity of TICK data. This migration also reduces costs related to maintaining on-premises infrastructure and enhances data processing speed, allowing for real-time analytics and more informed decision-making at scale.
At Hakkoda, we’re here to make your TICK data migration as smooth and impactful as possible. Our modern, AI-driven approach is tuned to streamline your data pipelines, optimize performance, and empower you to harness Snowflake’s full potential.
With leadership sourced from some of the top financial service institutions, we also understand the unique complexities that surround financial data, and can help you build and implement a solution that meets your governance, security, and compliance requirements.
Ready to see how migrating TICK data to Snowflake can supercharge your analytics and decision-making capabilities? Talk to one of our experts today.
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