The Chief Executive Officer of Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE), Mr. Oscar Onyema yesterday urged capital market participants and investors to exploit the NSE data for smart investment decisions.
Onyema made the call while speaking at the NSE market data workshop in Lagos with the theme: “Understanding Market Data for Savvy Investing and Wealth Creation.”
According to him, domestic investors, and indeed foreign portfolio investors, require an elevated level of insight in order to discern between great investments and lame investments, especially during a challenging down cycle.
“That is why this workshop is designed specifically to provide capital market participants with sufficient knowledge about exploiting NSE market data for smart investment decisions,” he said.
Onyema explained that when they talk about market data, they refer to the pre and post trade-related data for the financial instruments traded on the NSE.
“Our market data informs traders, investors, media and others in our market on the quotations, latest price, and historical trends for the equities, fixed-income, and exchange traded funds (ETF) products that are traded on our platform. This information is not only used in real time to make instantaneous buy and sell decisions, but the historical market data is used to make price projections, as well as calculate market risk on investment portfolios,” he said.
He noted that for exchanges, delivery of market data to users is resource heavy and requires specialised technologies designed to handle the collection, processing and dissemination of massive data streams.
At the NSE, this effort is underpinned by our ‘next generation’ trading engine, X-GEN, which was built in collaboration with Nasdaq in 2013. It is therefore very pleasant that this workshop is coinciding with the 3rd anniversary of X-GEN.
X-GEN is not only built to trade a wide range of securities, it is extendable to multiple interfaces for the consumption of market data. Additionally, it is FIX protocol version 5 enabled, improving market transparency and providing wide market access. It is these systems that we rely on daily to deliver approximately 2.5GB worth of data to our various domestic and global market data consumers. Excellence drives our services, thus we continually challenge ourselves to deliver our data faster and in more easily accessible formats to our clients,” he said.
