Tag, You're It

To enable quantitative shops doing algorithmic and programmatic trading to analyze all this information, Dow Jones has tagged it with meta data and other coded information. "There's a lot of meta data and time stamp information that will provide specifications so they will understand the language we speak," says Dreifus. "They can take that and build their models."

Meta data allows a computer to identify which company news covers and what the story is about, such as earnings, or merger and acquisition activity. The Dow Jones meta data also describes in what region and industry a company operates.

In the past, this type of analysis was difficult, according to Bear Stearns' Cherasia. "You had to parse out these news feeds yourselves, and a lot of the information was replicated across a few news sources," he says.

To ensure that its product meets the needs of Wall Street firms, Dow Jones has been communicating with them as it developed the archive over the past 12 to 18 months. "They're selling into the proprietary trading shops within the bulge-bracket firms and the hedge funds," relates Adam Sussman, senior consultant at TABB Group, which worked with Dow Jones on the feed to help it figure out the market for the product. "The hedge funds and proprietary shops are going to take all that data and put it into their models and see if it's worth anything," he says.

Initially, proprietary trading desks -- which contribute the bulk of Wall Street's earnings these days -- have shown the most interest, according to Dow Jones' Lanza, who notes this pertains not only to equities, but across asset classes, including fixed income and commodities. Still, all the leading players in algorithmic trading are aware of the Dow Jones product.

"We're definitely aware of the Dow Jones product and a few of the others," says Tony Huck, managing director at Investment Technology Group in New York. "It's something that we've been looking at -- and investigating the products and the prices of the feeds -- for some time."