HSBC platform uses AI to analyse trading data thousands of times faster

HSBC is offering a trading service that will use artificial intelligence (AI) to gain trading insights from publicly available information to help its clients make decisions when trading shares in companies.

The bank’s US business is using IBM Watson and technology from EquaBot in AiPEX, which will learn from publicly available data, including company announcements and tweets.

Monitoring the 1,000 largest companies listed, the service will predict which shares are likely to grow. It uses the same methods as traditional research in this area, but will be automated and thousands of times faster.

With the volume of data available about companies and their strategies exploding, trading companies need to be able to monitor data in near-real time and make investment decisions based on it.

Dave Odenath, head of quantitative investment solutions, Americas, at HSBC Global Banking and Markets, said investors needed to be able to keep up with the growing amount of data being generated each day.

“We are now able to offer clients solutions that not only keep up, but thrive in an increasingly complex world of data. AiPEX with Watson simulates a team of thousands of analysts and traders working around the clock to learn from millions of pieces of information and identify potential investment opportunities,” said Odenath.

“AiPEX with Watson simulates a team of thousands of analysts and traders working around the clock to learn from millions of pieces of information and identify potential investment opportunities”

The trading sector relies on vast amounts of data about the performance of companies as well as historic economic trends. Technology is being offered by banks and other trading service providers to help businesses in the trading sector keep up.

For example, some of the datasets demanded by customers of financial data supplier Refinitiv are so large that many requests cannot be sent over fibre networks without huge delay. This means companies that want to analyse the data often have to transport it by truck on hard disks and upload it to their servers.

Refinitiv recently announced it was using Google Cloud to remove the need to physically transport data or even transfer it over fibre networks. It moved its Tick History database into Google Cloud to enable customers to analyse the data there.

“Cloud computing and other digital technology advancements are transforming how data is analysed in the capital markets sector,” Catalina Vazquez, proposition director for the Tick History database at Refinitiv, recently told Computer Weekly.

“As the cloud delivers on its promise to make AI-based analytics more readily available, the potential of data to deliver answers that drive business performance gets ever greater.”

US stock exchange Nasdaq recently said it was using Amazon Web Services (AWS) application programming interfaces (APIs) to give its investment industry customers access to trading data in real time.