Sunday, January 11, 2009

Reuters Feeds and Market Cap (Grrrr....)

We need to find out the market cap of a company that we are receiving quotes on from Reuters using RFA 6.x. We see a field called "MKT_CAP" coming through on the initial quotes. Looking at the Reuters documentation, this should contain the market capitalization of the company.

However, every MKT_CAP field has the value of zero.

Reuters support has confirmed that the MKT_CAP field will ALWAYS be 0 for every quote.

So, Reuters ... why are you sending this field with every quote if you are never populating it? And, how many other fields that come with each quote are not being populated with valid values? Don't you realize that low-latency means that you should be sending the minimum of data for a quote .... and we expect each and every field to contain something useful?

Brian ... please clean this up if you can.


©2009 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved.
All opinions here are personal, and have no relation to my employer.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Marc,

You may or may not be aware of the Thomson Reuters developer community @ www.reuters.com/developer ? (I'm the Community Manager). We have a developer data forum specifically for this sort of post: https://infoblog.reuters.com/developer/connect/infoblog/default.aspx?c=d&blog_id=54

You would be discussing this with Techncial Reuters staff, other members of your company, as well as other clients (for real-world answers)

Many thanks
Tom Ablewhite

Anonymous said...

Hi Marc,

A simple answer is that each instrument is assigned a particular set of FIDs – the record template – and all of them may not be populated. It is not possible to populate every one due to lack of information supplied by the source, such as an exchange. A single record template can be used by many instruments from different sources that have similar, but not exactly the same fields. I'm sorry you've found this frustrating, but this extra field is only sent on images, not updates, so it should have negligible impact on latency.
Market cap is not provided by our real-time feed, IDN, for most instruments. Number of shares outstanding and other reference data is available from our Datascope Select Service. DataScope Select data is available programmatically via a web service API. I hope this meets your needs.

Rich Tella
Thomson Reuters