Man Group to Integrate Database Platform with Bloomberg

Investment manager Man Group has signed a multi-year open source technology development and product integration agreement with Bloomberg for a new DataFrame database product, ArcticDB.

ArcticDB is a Python-native database that was built in response to what the firms term the ever-increasing amount of data and complexity of front-office research at Man Group, a challenge faced by many large buy-side and sell-side institutions.

Bloomberg will integrate ArcticDB into BQuant, its analytics platform for quantitative analysts and data scientists in the financial markets to build, test, and deploy models for alpha generation, risk, and trading. Bloomberg says these models often rely on high volume timeseries data that include its financial and alternative linked datasets, as well as a firm’s own internal data.

The first iteration of ArcticDB was made available on an open source basis via GitHub and has seen over one million downloads since 2015. The latest version continues this approach and adds a commercial proposition through an enterprise version for production use, the firms say.

“Today’s tools are simply not built to address the challenges of real-world data science,” observes Gary Collier, CTO of Man Group Alpha Technology. “Datasets are massive, complex and time-varying, however, regardless of their original form, DataFrames quickly emerge as the unit of analysis in modern data science workflows and ArcticDB makes this a first-class concern. By streamlining how we work, ArcticDB enhances our ability to generate new trading strategies, optimise portfolios, and manage investment risk. These are all features that we expect Bloomberg users will appreciate too.”

Mark Jones, deputy CEO at Man Group, adds, “Technology is part of our DNA; we’re using our 35 years of quant investing and technology experience to improve performance and efficiency across alpha generation, trading and execution, and risk management. ArcticDB has transformed the way we handle data, and we’re confident it will do the same for others.”

This is a theme continued by Shawn Edwards, CTO of Bloomberg, who says, “This will give Bloomberg’s quantitative clients the ability to process, analyse, and backtest using billions of rows of timeseries data in seconds as they seek new ways to generate alpha. In addition, this effort further reinforces Bloomberg’s ‘open source first’ philosophy, in which our engineers both use and contribute to the broader open source ecosystem.”