Context…it’s vitally important. In the capital markets, you can have all the data in the world, but without a way to connect the dots, the only thing you’ll get is a bill from your cloud provider at the end of the month with little alpha to show for it.
Before we talk market data, first, some back story. Launched in 2011, HPR was once known as Hyannis Port Research. As someone who used to spend a week camping in Cape Cod every summer, I know Hyannis, Massachusetts, and its lovely port town quite well, but my guess is that most outside of the northeast USA were asking themselves, “What’s a ‘Hyannis Port?’” More importantly, though, was that the old name might have been a bit misleading. I’m speculating here, but Hyannis Port Research might have summoned the image of an equity research provider in many minds, instead of a hardcore hardware technology provider researching cutting-edge ways to conduct risk checks on US order flow.
Last year the Wall Street Journal wrote of the company, “This Little Black Box Does Heavy Lifting for Wall Street.” Now, I’m not saying that we’re trendsetters or nuthin’, but WSJ published that story three months after we had HPR founder and CEO Tony Amicangioli on the Waters Wavelength podcast…but I digress.
The point is that HPR had made its name as a hardware provider, but that isn’t necessarily the future of the company…or at least not in its entirety. With its 2018 launch of Omnibot, which serves as a low-latency switch, router, and pre-trade risk gateway, HPR began to move in a new direction. Omnibot leverages HPR’s Unimus management and control framework, which underpins the vendor’s entire solution set, including Riskbot, Softbot, and it’s soon-to-be-released Databot. As the company puts it, “Unimus marries HPR’s telecom, cloud, and capital markets microstructure expertise in both hardware and software to create a single platform on which a user’s entire CMI stack can be built.”
While Unimus has been around from the beginning, it would seem that HPR is now leveraging it to really grow its software/cloud suite of services. In an interview with me last week about the new market data solution, Amicangioli kept on stressing that he wants HPR to be a “one-stop shop” for users in the low-latency trading space. In order to be a one-stop shop, they needed to address clients’ market data needs.
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