Agenda

• Understand tasks of individuals and groups on ‘The Street’

  • Buy-side investment responsibilities

  • Sell-side professionals acting as intermediaries 

  • Market support duties that underlie the markets

• Regulation, risk, and compliance

  • Define regulation as the creation of rules designed to manage markets, protect market participants, and correct perceived problems and inequities

  • Unpack risk as: 

    • The uncertainty about future returns on financial assets or portfolios

    • The probability that a firm or department will be subjected to losses because of events in the market, improper controls, or profligacy

    • Compliance as oversight of the activities within an entity ensuring regulations are obeyed, contracts honored, and risk minimized

• Examine the important methods used by trading venues engaged in trading a variety of instruments

• Understand how each process step both consumes information and produces it 

• Identify how networks link functions and provide the infrastructure that makes trading efficient 

• Understand dedicated technologies — systems, data, and networks — that support trading

• Interpret technology and other services provided by support entities

• Develop a framework that classifies the products and services that are offered by vendors

• Review important vendors in the markets and the products they offer

• Explain the process used to collect and distribute market data 

• Introduce the parallel licensing and payments required to compensate data creators and distributors 

Data usage

• Recap of market data users and methods of usage

  • Display users: visual presentation

  • Non-display usage: processing market data

• Understand data services 

• Examine the scope of data usage needs 

• Data-usage categories commonly used to group users with similar value profiles

• Define information based on dimensions:

  • Type of data

  • Characteristics

  • Instrument groups to which it applies

  • Factors associated with distribution

• Understand common attributes of information

• Fundamental concept of licensing data for use 

• Understanding the implications of ownership versus licensing 

• Influences on what data owners expect 

• What data users are permitted to do with the data licensed

• Licensing data processes:

  • Acquire data

  • Contract for use

  • Entitle users and applications to access data

  • Report usage and usage changes

  • Create, approve, and pay invoices

  • Respond to periodic audits

  • Terminate a service

• Explore technology that captures, transforms, and normalises data 

• Load data into databases for access by different displays and applications

• Integrate applications designed for new environments with data and applications provided in legacy structures and proprietary vendor formats

• Examine the process of managing data from the perspectives of data owners, vendors, and users 

• The business of data

  • Revenue from licensing data (for the owner and vendor) 

  • The cost of data (for the user)

  • Data units capturing the quantity of data consumed 

  • How the price attempts to relate revenue/cost to value

• Understand the processes and technologies used to distribute real-time and bulk information

Issues 

• New and emerging issues on FISD Syllabus 

  • New regulations

  • Evolving market structure issues such as “high-frequency trading” 

  • Momentum around “enterprise data management”

• Preparing for the exam