Market data is essential for physical commodity markets. Traders, brokers, transporters, financiers, and consumers rely on this essential information to negotiate, transact, bill, and account for various activities, but this comes at huge expense to them.

It’s easy to blame market data vendors, publishers, and exchanges for high fees, but firms eventually have to realize if they want to reduce their data spend, they have to work with industry experts like Phycomex to help optimize, negotiate, and manage their market data spend.

Increasingly complex selling strategies from market data providers and new regulations such as Basel II make the need for controlling market data greater than ever before. This has resulted in a surge in data audits/reviews from data providers making sure they get paid what they feel they are entitled to.

The cost of data may be based not only on specific feeds or data sets, but also the number of users who access the data, how and where the data is being used, through which systems, outputs/delivery methods, etc. There are also a number of black box methods used to calculate a form of enterprise license in the guise of being more transparent, apparently.