From Zero to 9600 and to infinity

So, in the previous episode of the book of the t-shirt of the movie, I was working with wind tunnels and had a taste of.. #marketdata. My Reuters journey had just begun.

Starting work at Reuters in the early 90's was so refreshing. It felt we were on the edge of an evolutionary change in financial services. I worked as a Systems Consultant in Information Management Systems (IMS) Sales in City West, (led by Claude Green ) based in Kildare House on Dorset Rise. As you can guess there were three other divisions. The big cheeses all worked round the corner at 85 Fleet Street, and the Marketing and Product folk worked at Hulton House on Fleet Street.

The core data distribution network for Reuters was the Integrated Data Network (IDN). The infrastructure for this was based at Docklands, where, not only did it have its own hovercraft service for employees south of the Thames but was also pioneering on the computing front by switching out its VAX based computers for upgraded DEC Alphas. The edge devices as we would call them today was the "AMS" box/server. The data and server effectively constituted the SelectFeed Plus (superseded SelectFeed) consolidated data feed. The feed was considered "interactive", not quite in the sense we know today, but you had to configure the watchlist. It used a combination of an interactive side-channel for command and control and then a broadcast channel from IDN to populate the watchlist cache. The main selling point was that you paid for the watchlist size, which determined the AMS box size, so, for as little as 300 instruments you needed a "Model V" and for the maximum (!) of 9600 instruments you'd need a "Model E" AMS. The connection between your AMS box and the IDN network was with the high speed ISDN (UK/Europe) or T1 (US). With ISDN you could get 64k or if you used bonding you could get twice that at 128k.

I never did quite understand why the watchlist size of an AMS/SelectFeed Plus was aligned to baud rates; 300, 600, 1200, 2400, 4800, 9600..

Every time I wander round the City in the proximity of Leadenhall Market, I was always remember 'selling' to the Deutsche Bank Arbitrage Unit. They literally could not get enough feeds and would just phone and ask for more. I think in the end they topped out at 10 AMS's at 96,000 instruments. In fact, it was largely symptomatic of everyone in the city phoning up and saying "I want one". At the same time, there was also the evil empire down the road, 彭博资讯 , selling their dull "Terminals".

Reflecting back on those times, it was interesting to note that Reuters' relationships were built with technology individuals/groups, whilst the evil empire was forging business relationships with traders. I won't pass judgement on either approaches.

At that time, the Reuters offering was the Reuters Trader Workstation (RTW) or the even more powerful Personal Trader Workstation (PTW) and not forgetting that other feature/TLA of the Personal Data Dictionary (PDD) for all things DDE, all running under Windows. There was also the Advanced Trader Workstation (ATW) running on Unix. One of my specialists areas was around selling the ability to contribute back into IDN (for OTC) using the MarketLink protocol using either Data Contributions Server (DCS) or the new Optimising Contributions Server (OCS). I remember one sales conversation with Morgan Grenfell in Great Winchester Street speaking with "Vince" and everytime we had a meeting about the latest and greatest OCS, I'd have to go back and update him on the changes that had taken place in the past week. That particular conversation took weeks until OCS settled down.

The City West divisional territory included the West London clients, as well as all Japanese clients, so we had an interesting mix of interactions. Reuters was also very good at looking after its employees. I remember a series of train strikes in 1994 which meant we could get into work/London but we couldn't get home. Reuters' offer was to put us up in hotels, not any old hotels, but The Waldorf. We went on training, en masse, all four divisions to Marrakech to learn how to trade as open outcry. They had assembled mock-ups of pits and we had to train/practice each role (runners, traders, etc). To this day, I still know my hand signals for selling N lots. We had sales outings that involved experiences in gliders, hot air ballooning in Colorado, skiing in Banff, and, all you can eat in TGI Fridays. It was a family, and to this day I cherish the life-long friends I made from those days onwards. Many of them have gone on to further their destinies in #marketdata, and others have taken diverse tangents looking after our well-being.

I have to say that those City West days were the best. It all got a bit serious in the mid-90's and the organisation consolidated into International Division and National Division, where we were based at Thomas Moore Square and Commodity Quay. One very successful group of sales people during this time were the Dealing 2000 FX guys. FX Matching had gone from 1000 matches in early '92 to 20,000 in '95. So much so, that they were often splashing the cash and celebrating. One particular day, they invited 'individuals' from the very loud 'purple' palace across the road and brough them all into the office. Those that know, know.. The FX team then received a slap on the wrist and they became much more subdued. There was a sales contest, where the winner won a brand new Ferrari, but the tax implications were so great, he kept it a couple of weeks and then had to sell it.

In '93, Reuters went on to buy Effix, a Paris based company, that had developed a very visual interface known as Kobra (who had also developed Kondor+). Lots of products had a '2000 branding to them and by mid 90's Reuters had moved on to branding them with '3000 so huge push to sell Reuters 3000 Xtra, etc.

I haven't said much about Triarch, but it became the defacto standard for a MarketData Distribution System (MDS) that everyone tried to emulate, until 彭博资讯 usurped that idea with a PaaS offering, before even the PaaS phrased came to be. Triarch, became Triarch 2000, then RMDS, then TREP, then RTDS, and has been very successful and prevalent in the industry. Even today, config files allude to the legacy Triarch, and most people call it "TREP" (Thomson Reuters Enterprise Platform).

I stayed at Reuters until the late 90's, when we were offered incentives to stay until 1st January 2000 when planes would fall out of the sky and market data failed. I spent those final couple of years in the newly formed Reuters Consulting helping clients build solutions around Triarch and the SSL API with one assignment to Citi working on an FX ticket matching system.

I've thoroughly enjoyed researching different aspects of this article. If you liked to know more about Reuters, check out this article about the 1995-1998 era, 1991-1994, and also this article about 1995-1998.

What memories do you have of those days in #marketdata? I often wondered how Bloomberg perceived Reuters during those years. Any incredible stories ? Let's not discuss Christmas parties :-)