Market Data Vital to Stock Market Investors—Experts

By Dipo Olowookere

Stock market investors have been advised not to joke with market data if they hope to succeed in the capital market.

Speakers at the 2nd edition of the Market Data Workshop organised by the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) on Wednesday, October 4, 2017 at the Civic Centre, Lagos, noted that adequate knowledge of the market data helps investors in making sound investment decisions.

At the event themed ‘Market Data: The Bedrock of Wealth Creation,’ the chief executive of the NSE, Mr Oscar Onyema, noted that the NSE Market Data workshop was designed to provide participants with more insights into the importance of market data in making robust and informed investment decisions.

“Market Data, the by-product of activities on the platform of the Exchange, remains a key ingredient for investment endeavours.

“We are leveraging this workshop to intimate investors of our new data products that will complement our existing list of non-display products, which cut across real time, reference and thematic datasets,” he said.

According to him, “Market events of yesterday are written in Market Data, just as a book​ is written for its readers. So, if it is true that readers are leaders, then it is safe to conjecture that the investors who read Market Data would eventually lead the market, that is, emerge profitable.”

On his part, the keynote speaker, the CEO of Financial Derivatives, Mr Bismark Rewane, noted that market data is vital to real-time trading and described Nigeria as an economy evolving into a perfect market. In his opinion, the crash and the loss of value, live and assets were driven by people making decisions on fictitious data.

“Wonder banks, MMM and other investment schemes have all been possible due to lack of frequency of data,” he said.

Delivering his presentation titled ‘The Market Game Changers: Market Data, Mobile Trading, Algo Trading, Machine Learning,’ the Executive Director, Market Operations and Technology, NSE, Mr Ade Bajomo, stated that “timely access to market intelligence and swift trade execution remains key to wealth creation.”

Some of the other speakers included Euvin Naidoo, Head of Financial Institutions for Africa, Thomson Reuters, who made a presentation on ‘Extending Market Horizon through FinTech’ and Mrs Omoleye Alake, Team Lead, Market Data, NSE who spoke on ‘Understanding Market Data Contracts.’

Both agreed that market data was very important to investors in the capital market because it would help them make the right decisions.

The workshop also featured three panel sessions on ‘Leveraging Market Data to drive high-end returns’, ‘How Exchanges across Africa can come together for a viable market data business’ and ‘The role of media in Market Data.’

This year’s workshop brought together more than 40​0 in-person attendees, and 21 speakers and panel discussants, for rich discussions in topics ranging from leveraging market data to drive high end returns, to extending market horizon through FinTech.

In addition, about 401,425 people joined the workshop on Twitter via the hash tag #NSEMDW2017 which was one of the trending topics in Nigeria with over 3.4million impressions.