Money.Net, the market data and financial news platform that positions itself as a low-cost alternative to Bloomberg and Reuters terminals, has added real-time futures and options on futures from exchanges in Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Americas. The company is sourcing the price data from CQG and other providers, and making it available through its new cloud-based HTML5 platform.
The New York-based company, which was founded in 2014, said the addition of real-time futures prices was "heavily requested" by its customers, many of whom are equity market professionals. Money.Net currently provides data and news for fixed income, foreign exchange, commodities and equity markets.
The company also recently introduced real-time prices for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Users can track current prices and total trading volume. The company said many of its customers are interested in this information even though they do not trade cryptocurrencies themselves because they view it as a useful indicator of market sentiment.
"What you're seeing is that we're adding other asset classes to the platform," said Stefanos Daskalakis, chief product officer at Money.Net. "We're aiming for market participants who are currently accessing futures data on other platforms. We think they will find our price point very attractive in comparison."
Money.Net is attempting to displace the legacy terminals on trading desks by offering a low-cost alternative based on more modern technology. Subscriptions cost just $150 per month and provide access to streaming real-time prices, breaking financial news, technical analysis charts, economic statistics and corporate actions. The company also emphasizes that the new HTML5 platform is designed to be very easy to set up. Rather than installing software, a user just clicks on a single button to boot up the entire platform on a web browser. In addition, the platform is integrated with various technology and market data partners, including the Symphony communications platform used by many large investment banks, so that users can launch multiple applications with a single login.
Daskalakis said that the futures data includes forward months as well as the front month contract. Several dozen exchanges are covered, including ASX, Eurex, ICE Futures Europe and the London Metal Exchange. The platform includes charting functions that can display futures prices going back five years. Currently the data is limited to the "top of book" prices but Daskalakis said the company expects to start offering tick level data in the coming months. He added that Money.Net already had prices for U.S. equity options available on the platform and now offers data on futures options as well.
