How NSE’s market data will boost investment

The Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) has stated that the exchange’s market data would enable investor to calculate market risk on investment portfolios, as well as make price projections.

According to the Chief Executive Officer of the NSE, Oscar Onyema, domestic investors, and indeed foreign portfolio investors, require an elevated level of insight in order to discern between ‘great’ investments and ‘lame’ ones, especially during a challenging down cycle.

Onyema, while addressing participants at the NSE Market Data Workshop held in Lagos yesterday, explained that the workshop was designed specifically to provide capital market participants with sufficient knowledge about exploiting NSE market data for smart investment decisions.

“In spite of the challenging economic conditions we are experiencing in Nigeria, the capital market still remains one of the main vehicles for economic development and wealth creation.

“The NSE Premium Board has returned 11.3 per cent YTD October 17, 2016. The level of private sector time deposits have declined by 14.4 per cent to N3.8 trillion over the last one year (Sep ’15 to Aug ’16), while private sector savings deposits have increased by 19.0 per cent to N3.5 trillion.

“The average interest rate on these savings and time deposits are 3.6 per cent and 5.9 per cent respectively. With an average inflation rate of 12.7 per cent over the last year, the NSE Market Data Workshop, themed, ‘Understanding Market Data for Savvy Investing and Wealth Creation’ could not be more apt.”

He pointed out that the delivery of market data to users is resource heavy and requires specialised technologies designed to handle the collection, processing and dissemination of massive data streams.

“At the NSE, this effort is underpinned by our ‘next generation’ trading engine, X-GEN, which was built in collaboration with Nasdaq in 2013. It is therefore very pleasant that this workshop is coinciding with the 3rd anniversary of X-GEN.

“X-GEN is not only built to trade a wide range of securities, it is extendable to multiple interfaces for the consumption of market data. Additionally, it is FIX protocol version five enabled, improving market transparency and providing wide market access.

“It is these systems that we rely on daily to deliver approximately 2.5GB worth of data to our various domestic and global market data consumers. Excellence drives our services, thus we continually challenge ourselves to deliver our data faster and in more easily accessible formats to our clients,” he added.