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

[HobbyTrading]

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.

So you start this thread by publicly announcing and promoting the start of activities. And then, in a follow-up message, mention that new customers cannot yet be accepted. I would consider that bad timing. You'd better wait promoting your company until you can actually handle new customers. By the time you are able to accept new customers they may have forgotten about you.

 

[Databento]

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

To preface, we haven't used CQG so we don't understand their offerings particularly well.

However, we're very familiar with other data feeds catering to large institutions ranging in the $1.5k-$6k MRC per venue price range and have intentionally built up a superior stack to replace those feeds.

For example, most vendors have instability or high WAN link latency because they depend solely on a single (often the cheapest) bandwidth provider. You'll see this if you traceroute some of our competitors' API gateways and it always takes a hop through Cogent or HE.net before it terminates on their gateway. If you traceroute the FQDN for our historical API gateway (hist.databento.com), you'll most likely see any of the diverse routes through all of the tier 1 bandwidth providers (e.g. Lumen, Arelion, NTT) and private peering routes (e.g. Google Cloud, Verizon, Comcast) that we've aggregated.

We're sparing no expense to build the most performant feed and so our primary purpose is not to compete with low cost providers. Typically, a solution like ours would be cost-prohibitive to the individual trader, but by metering our fees, anyone can use it - just like how you can spin up thousands of cores on AWS for dollars.

In any case, if you love any other vendor's offering, you don't have to change that! That's also one awesome thing about our pay-as-you-go model. You can simply use us as a backup feed or data source, and you'd have zero cost commitment. And it's quite likely that any of your real-time licenses with the market through your original vendor already concurrently covers our use case, so you wouldn't have to pay additional real-time license fees. Some of our beta users are relying on us in this manner.

 

[Databento]

So you start this thread by publicly announcing and promoting the start of activities. And then, in a follow-up message, mention that new customers cannot yet be accepted. I would consider that bad timing. You'd better wait promoting your company until you can actually handle new customers. By the time you are able to accept new customers they may have forgotten about you.

Thanks, we appreciate the feedback.

 

[jtrader33]

@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!

What kind of timeframe are you anticipating?

 

[cruisecontrol]

Will you support selective download of certain data elements from larger feeds? For example, auction trades and imbalances.
Will you support raw (non normalized) data?

 

[M.W.]

I probably forgot to add another possible reason, which is that some brokers are afraid the competition undercuts them re pricing when the data is publicly shown. However, any clever competitor can obtain pricing data of competitors without even minimal efforts. So, unless other reasons escape me, there is not need for a phone call besides the already mentioned.

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.

 

[Overnight]

...

For example, most vendors have instability or high WAN link latency because they depend solely on a single (often the cheapest) bandwidth provider...

I might get a spanking for this, but that instability comment, I just had to chime in. It's FUNNY!

Sorry, carry on.

 

[2rosy]

can an end user redistribute this data raw? or run scanners on it and distribute that?
any metrics?

 

[M.W.]

I don't think they have thought about any of this. I signed up for email updates and was informed they got basically almost nothing in place and was just moved into another wait queue. I think they made a premature announcement and now need to stir back. A little embarrassing to advertise services and then being unable to offer anything at all

can an end user redistribute this data raw? or run scanners on it and distribute that?
any metrics?

 

[Databento]

Will you support selective download of certain data elements from larger feeds? For example, auction trades and imbalances.
Will you support raw (non normalized) data?

Yes, we're in the midst of adding message schemas for imbalance, RPI and cross-trades as part of our recent integration of the NYSE Integrated prop feeds.

We won't be providing raw data over internet. The reason being that it's impractical to distribute raw multicast data over sparse WAN links. Our normalization, compression and proprietary binary encoding cuts down the size of the raw feed by at least a factor of 20x and is the only reason we're able to distribute full market feeds over internet.

We do normalize the data in a way that preserves some of the packet-level information and practically all of the payload-level information though, to the point that it is possible to simulate a passive market making strategy with very high fidelity.

Our distribution licenses do allow us to distribute raw data though so we plan to offer that next year when we focus on our colo offerings.