Investment bank equity trading analysis

Information is the life-blood of investment banks, steering business in areas as diverse as trading and HR. For these banks, distinguishing good equity trading clients or traders from bad is difficult, given an ever-changing background of market gains and losses. Golden Orb built and operated the technology to support a “service bureau” allowing investment banks to do exactly this.

Equity trading is a large-scale business. Traders perform vast numbers of trades in the shares of many companies each day across exchanges spanning the globe. Each trade needs to be analysed individually in its market context, and the results combined to derive a true understanding of the economics of the business.

The model we built for the service bureau combined banks’ trade reports with a trade-by-trade market data feed for processing – hundreds of millions of detailed records each month. A process was established to perform complex calculations on this database, transforming the raw data into rich information, ready for reporting.

In addition to the results themselves, a standard “reporting pack” created by the bureau would be prepared for investment banks, providing a high-level summary. This step was automated to prepare a PowerPoint presentation based on the latest results from the analysis – releasing time, otherwise needed for manual and error-prone data entry, to invest in other revenue-generating activities for the business.