Databento - Direct market data feeds for everyone, built by former HFT traders

Discussion in 'Announcements' started by Databento, Jul 12, 2022.

  1. Databento

    Databento Sponsor

    Databento is excited to officially introduce ourselves to the EliteTrader community!

    We're bringing you fast, lightweight access to both live and historical data from multiple markets. Our platform combines the highest institutional standards: direct feeds sourced from market colos, full market order book feeds, nanosecond resolution timestamps with PTP, and a fast FPGA-based infrastructure.

    And we're reinventing how data is priced. Everything is available on a metered basis, with no contract lockup, and we pass through real-time license fees with zero markup. With this pay-as-you-go model, we're equalizing access to cutting edge infrastructure, serving everyone from the largest investment banks and prop firms to startups and individuals.

    Databento is built by former traders and engineers at leading HFT firms (Tower Research, Flow Traders, Jump, Belvedere, IMC), hedge funds (Two Sigma), institutional data vendors (Pico, Bloomberg), and hyperscale tech firms (Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Pinterest).

    Our platform features include:
    • Uses same raw multicast feeds and data sources used by the largest market making firms, hedge funds, and banks.
    • Fast, FPGA-based architecture with nanosecond resolution timestamps and PTP time sync with sub-mic accuracy.
    • Distributed straight from the market colos (e.g. Aurora I, NY4) — clean and accurate data with no third-party data providers in between.
    • Multiple schemas such as MBO, MBP, top of book, OHLCV, last sale, etc.
    • Fully normalized, i.e. identical message schemas for both live and historical data, across multiple asset classes.
    • Mappings between different symbology systems, including smart symbology for futures rollovers.
    • Point-in-time instrument definitions, free of look-ahead bias and retroactive adjustments.
    • Extremely efficient file format for historical data, with compressed Databento Binary Encoding.
    • Event-driven market replay, including at high-frequency order book granularity.
    • No usage limits. Consume data from a single symbol, or listen to every order book message from hundreds of thousands of symbols all at once.
    • Support for batch download of flat files.
    • Support for pandas, CSV, and JSON.
    • Compatible with any language through our HTTP, API, and TCP binary protocol. We also provide client libraries for Python and C++ .
    You can learn more about our platform and launch updates on EliteTrader, or by checking out our website, LinkedIn, and Slack community.
     
    shuraver, globalarbtrader and Occam like this.
  2. Robert Morse

    Robert Morse Sponsor

    Sophia, welcome to Elite Trader. What asset classes?
     
  3. Databento

    Databento Sponsor

    Thanks Robert! We're initially covering US-based futures, spot FX and equities.
     
  4. Nice, glad to see this has launched. No doubt it'll be a quality product. You didn't ask for it, but I'll offer some feedback in case you're interested. I think you'll get a lot more traction by allowing website visitors to explore the docs and pricing without signing up for an account. As a current user of 4 or 5 different data providers, I'd switch from any of them in a second if a superior product came along but 99 times out of 100 a new product offering doesn't have what I need. So, I'm not really willing to invest much time in exploring something new - has to be quick and easy (yep, I know how lazy this sounds). You're already asking potential customers to spend a decent chunk of time to figure out what their costs will look like under the unique pricing methodology. Incidentally, this is the problem with IEX Cloud in my opinion - way too much brain damage required to see what things will cost before one even tests to see if it'll meet their needs.
     
    M.W. and Craig66 like this.
  5. M.W.

    M.W.

    I second that. I am looking for a high quality data feed for backup purpose and potentially historical data for testing. But I miss more information on pricing. Why not making pricing transparent on the website. If its a transparent business model, as claimed, then there should not be a problem with offering a transparent pricing model without having to jump through hoops. This is the precise reason I stay far away from brokers (like L.....d, on this site) who hide their pricing and always want to discuss things on the phone 1990 style. I am highly suspicious of that and won't consider regardless of the quality of service. If pricing is already hard to come by then I probably have to beg a broker/data vendor for everything else down the road. Not with me...

     
    Databento and earth_imperator like this.
  6. Robert Morse

    Robert Morse Sponsor

    Is L…..d Lightspeed? We list details of our equity and option hurdles on our website and always have.

     
  7. Watch in the supermarket: products where the price is missing don't get bought much...
    That simple rule they don't figure out. 'uman 'tupidity...
    catman.jpeg
     
  8. Databento

    Databento Sponsor

    @M.W. @earth_imperator Thanks for the feedback. Actually, the reason that you don't see the pricing on our site is that (1) we've been in beta stage and haven't finalized pricing, and also (2) because we have a certain patent application that we wanted to file before making all of our UI designs public.

    When we finish onboarding all waitlist users and officially launch our site to the public (i.e. open registration), you'll see that we have a dynamic price calculator which tells you the pricing instantly and also estimates your monthly fees. Some screenshots below:

    Screen Shot 2022-07-12 at 4.22.10 PM.png Screen Shot 2022-07-12 at 4.22.27 PM.png

    @jtrader33 Same point above goes for our documentation, we'll open up the documentation to the public once we've closed the waitlist. And thank you - we'd love to hear more of your feedback once we go live and will reach out!
     
    M.W. likes this.
  9. Big AAPL

    Big AAPL

    I have to chime in...how can you possibly beat the CQG bundled futures price?
     
  10. M.W.

    M.W.

    You picked a few details where you offer pricing and other information publicly, yet on most issues you refuse to publicly offer more details and demand phone calls. I can recount probably 15-20 occasions if memory does not serve me wrong. That's not what I consider transparency. I worked in the industry for a very long time and discriminatory pricing towards clients was always preferred, knowing full well that clients receive different pricing according to the relationship and revenues they bring to the table. But fact is that every client understands commission schedules and why prices are more competitive for higher volume. I never understood why that fact is oftentimes hidden or at least only discussed in more detail over the phone. I can say with certainty that it has nothing at all to do with any regulatory requirements. It's either a misinformed mindset about regulations or psychological barriers thinking smaller clients would stay away if they saw what kind of deal larger clients get. And then of course there is the possibility that one might get away with charging more to naive clients, which can be better figured out over the phone in a p-p conversation. Though I am not accusing you of the latter as I lack evidence.

    Long story short I find your forthcoming with pricing, pending rates, margin rates and borrow rates one of the most intransparent in the industry alongside a few futures broker dinosaurs.

     
    #10     Jul 12, 2022