Capital markets firms are awash in data, both real-time and historical, and are looking for ways to harness that data for transaction cost analysis and reporting purposes.

Data visualization firm Two-N has created a platform, called Stockmapper, for presenting and classifying large collections of stocks or other financial instruments, providing a heat map view of the market alongside quotes, news feeds and historical graphs.

“Stockmapper allows users to organize heat maps by geographic region, industry, index, price change, trading volume and total market capitalization,” said Amit Schechter, director of development at Two-N.

Two-N has built a version of Stockmapper that incorporates 1,800 stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange, but the product can be configured to display other financial instruments. For example, Two-N created a version covering India’s stock markets for BluFin India, a Mumbai-based financial information company.

“Most of the [data] visualization that you see today is fairly generic, making use of data that everybody is familiar with, that you can get from a normal market data feed,” said John Halloran, a consultant to Two-N. “What we’re interested in doing is taking that type of visualization and the capabilities of that visualization and bringing in proprietary and other types of data.”

The tool could be applied to transaction cost analysis, by helping to sift the reams of data that firms collect for the most relevant.

“There’s so much data that it becomes very difficult to understand what meaningful data is,” Halloran said. “Taking a tool like StockMapper and applying it to execution venues or with specific algorithms that are being used is a great way to help people make better sense of their data that is available.”

The company is working on a tool to visualize 605 reporting data, in order to provide more insight “into who has deep liquidity, who is able to price improve orders, and break that down by particular stocks and sectors,” Halloran said.

SEC Rule 605 requires companies that trade national market system securities to make available to the public standardized, monthly reports containing uniform statistical measures of execution quality.

“The data that’s available in the current 605 reports is not very granular,” Halloran said. “Having a way of visualizing it to make it more intuitive and more actionable to a broader range of people would be of great benefit.”

Featured image via Dollar Photo Club