Liquidnet Expands into Provision of Investment Analytics

Today‘s news marks the official launch of Liquidnet’s third business, Investment Analytics (IA).

The new suite is comprised of four products, including IA Trader, IA PM, IA RSRHCX and IA APIs. Each one has been customised to a specific audience. Overall, the suite combines AI technologies, with machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP), bringing together market data, alternative data, research, corporate communications and other sources all into one system. The result is they collectively ensure crucial information is available to investment firms of all sizes.

Liquidnet explains that IA Trader helps equity traders by offering pre- and intra-trade analytics and alerts linked to their order pads and watchlists that require limited screen space. It derives compact stamp summaries combining market data, that includes price, volume, and short interest, with data from related markets like credit default swaps (CDS) and implied volatility, with other market moving factors including fundamentals, news, and events.

The second product, IA PM, caters to Risk Management , portfolio monitoring and alpha generation needs of portfolio managers. Built on a browser and a desktop application, OpenFin combines market data, alternative data, research, corporate communications and other sources into one system for equity portfolio managers, analysts, data scientists and quants.

Meanwhile, IA RSRCHX forms another pillar of the IA product suite and supplies users with over 4 million real time, cloud-hosted, research reports from over 425 firms.

“Finally, IA APIs meets the growing demand from institutions wanting to directly ingest unique data and analytics. In addition to our IA Trader data, a core component of our IA API offering is Liquidnets central bank and equity sentiment scoring which uses ML and NLP to quantify language patterns, providing previously unavailable quantitative signals,” the company further states.

Liquidnet is known for operating dark pools that allow institutional investors to trade stocks anonymously. Since launching in September 2015, Liquidnet‘s community of fixed income asset managers is now more than 1,000 asset management and hedge fund clients, who collectively manage $33 trillion in equity and fixed income assets. This growth has been fueled by members’ ability to trade in institutional size with an average execution of $2.4 million.

Additionally, Liquidnet has been expanding its portfolio by buying more AI and alternative data offerings. The first step was the acquisition of OTAS Technologies in 2017, followed by RSRCHXchange and Prattle in 2019.

Last week, TP ICAP confirmed plans to acquire Liquidnet in a proposed deal that values the US broker between $600 million and $700 million.