200 years of stock trading in Frankfurt – it’s all in the data

Trading stocks has a long history. Precisely 200 years ago, people started trading stocks in Frankfurt. As with every important decision – it was based on facts, research and gut feeling. But most decisions are also based on past experiences. At a very early stage, traders recognised the value of information; of reliable data to help them with their decisions and strategies. 

In the 13th century, bankers frequently used bills of exchange to speculate and, based on data they collected over time, tried to exploit seasonal variations in exchange rates and predict changes in economic and political conditions.

In 1808, Nathan Mayer Rothschild founded his bank house in London and, right from the start, its main asset was information. The family's blue and yellow uniformed messengers, their ships, their carriages hurried through the world bringing reports of victories and defeats, government crises and diplomatic cabals. Relatives, traders and journalists sat as correspondents in Rome, Turin, Florence, Milan, Odessa and Petersburg, New York, Baltimore and San Francisco. 

Carrier pigeons brought news of the outbreak of the Parisian July Revolution to London before the newspapers did. The opponents of the Rothschilds desperately tried to station hawks on the channel coast to intercept the fluttering messengers. 

Today, historical market data provides valuable insights for analyses, forecasts and trading strategies. Key requirements are quality of data and ease of access. In this context, it is of great importance that the data is of excellent quality, available quickly and flexibly, and easy to process. Historical market data is an integral part of Deutsche Börse’s data offering. The aim is to provide customers with a holistic solution, covering their needs for both real time and historical data. 

How are market data generated?

Market data are generated by means of a process that is organised, operated and monitored by exchanges. One of the core functions of stock exchanges is organised and transparent pricing.  

Regulated markets offer an attractive, secure and liquid trading environment in which fairness and transparency are paramount. Exchange trading and exchange data are two sides of the same coin. Trading and data are created on the same technical infrastructure: the exchange’s trading system. Market data is thus generated as a so-called “joint product” and cannot be separated from a trade’s execution. This is because every trade contains information such as the price, time and volume of the transaction. There’s no data without trading – and no trading without data. 

Who uses historical market data?

Historical data is used by a wide variety of customers – from small companies using the data to book transactions to highly sophisticated customers “polishing” their trading strategies. Use cases covered are also numerous – for example, drilling down covering compliance requirements, management reporting, trading new instruments, strategy design and refinement. Market data generated on exchanges support and boost functioning trading, competition and job creation. 

How can the data be analysed by customers?

Deutsche Börse’s Market Data + Services area recently launched A7®, an analytics platform that provides cloud-based access to most granular order-by-order historical market data from Eurex and Xetra. In the business’ Data Shop you will find high-quality historical market data from Europe’s leading trading systems Xetra and Eurex as well as Deutsche Börse and STOXX indices – directly from the source. In addition to that, a variety of analytics products are available to end users.

MD+S provides its customers with a big variety of historical data products – from the most granular historical market data captured in the order book files, via the high-precision timestamps files, offering valuable information on the flow of an order in the T7 architecture, to a selection of analytics products such as FLOWs and IOC liquidity indicators.