Mark Data Made Easy

Mark data

futures radio show sponsored by CME Group the world's leading and most diverse futures and options exchange semigroups markets help individuals and businesses around the world effectively manage risk for access to free educational tools and resources for the active individual trader please visit active trader dot CME Group comm every day traders and investors dive in to tackle the ever-changing markets to find opportunity futures radio show is your number one source for answers to the questions that all market participants want to ask veteran futures trader Anthony crude deli sits down with the most influential leaders and top traders in the industry here's your host Anthony crew deli hey everybody thanks for tuning in for this episode with Marc Heriberto remember new shows are posted on Mondays and Thursdays you could subscribe to the show on iTunes and YouTube if you're enjoying the show please leave a review on iTunes before I played today's interview for you I want to give a shout out to the great sponsors of futures radio show see me Group trading technologies rjo futures and tap step trader to learn more about these sponsors and the important things they are doing for futures traders be sure to click on their logos on our website today I spoke with the CEO of bar chart Marc Heriberto we chatted about bar chart and data for commodities trading Marc explains how they've taken proprietary data and turned it into indices we discussed bar charts latest ads on their platform commodity view and he tells us about an upcoming live event that bar chart is hosting for commodities traders so without further ado let me take you right to the interview with Marc I know today we're gonna talk a lot about what it is that you guys are currently doing at bar chart the traders should take a look at but man the history I have with you guys go so hold me back to the beginning of my career I remember getting online and searching for futures markets very few things came up but you guys did so you have been a great resource for me for many many years over 20 years so before we get into what it is that you guys are currently doing some new ads that you have at bar chart tell everybody that out there that doesn't know what bar chart is what it is that you guys do yes sounds good sounds good so if you're not familiar with us I mean bar charts been online you know we started in 1995 as one of the first websites for futures and commodities data and it started as a subscription product and we've evolved since 1995 into a full-fledged data and technology company that has really to two distinct arms one is media and that's bar chart comm which is free for traders and investors and other market participants to use and we cover equities and futures and options and ETFs and currencies and crypto both through free access to the website as well as free registered access where you get more tools and more data and then we have a subscription-based service to bar chart comm called bar chart premier where you get even more data more tools to help make trading and investing decisions and then the other distinct arm is our solutions business where we provide solutions to businesses in all those sectors and being a Chicago based company and starting in Chicago our bread and butter is is commodities and within commodities we've always done a lot within agriculture yeah following you guys over the years I've always noticed that you've had a really strong focus on the AG space and as of late I know that you guys have added some things that you're really excited about specific for grain traders talk to us about what you've recently added yeah yeah thanks so we've had a lot of different products for the AG and grain industry you know ranging from grain buyers to farmers to grain traders and speculators and analysts and brokers really the whole mix and those products have been offered through three different product groupings of bar chart one being bar chart the other we bought in 2001 commodity Research Bureau which has been around since 1934 CRB for short has always had its own suite of products and then about ten years ago we launched a brand called Agri charts which we branded to go a little bit more direct to grain elevators and the institutional space in grain starting with things like web hosting and content things like quotes and charts and news for grain elevator websites that has it has been fine for many years but as we have started to grow within the space and really offer more we needed to tie those three pieces back together in a unified suite of products the key thing we've been trying to do is one you know bar chart that's our company everything is underneath bar chart we don't have other divisions and that may have been confusing to some folks for a long time and we really focused on establishing bar chart as the brand with product Suites underneath it and for the commodity space what we've what we did in the fall 2007 we launched a brand a new brand called commodity spelled CMD t y so the abbreviation for commodity and we've pulled all of our commodity products underneath that brand mainly our AG brand and egg products were which were Agri charts and CRB that those products are all now under CMD T Y which is really a collection of data products and tools and software that are offered to commodity professionals and institutional commodity clients and this range is everything from everything from exchange price data to cash market data for grain to Newswires that we offer to the grain industry we offer physical a physical trading platform for for grain we and then we wrap all these things up into a platform called commodity view so really it's it's it's a specialized product grouping right now all targeting the grain sector one thing that you currently did was you took proprietary data that you turned into indexes explain that everybody please yeah so a big part of the commodity suite of products is focused on establishing new sets of data that are proprietary and one thing we've been doing for a long time is offering access to physical grain markets grain elevator cash prices and basis and we've offered that you know through different tools like our software and API is where you could look up local grain markets by zip code we've now taken that data and we've aggregated that data and you're talking about tens of thousands of different pricing points there's thousands of different grain buy and locations across the u.s. well as a whole you know that's a lot to look at so we've distilled bet down into these new indexes they're they're labeled C mdty indexes and in this case they're specific to grain we now calculate geographically based cash price and basis indexes for corn soybeans and wheat so one example would be take the state of Iowa we look at each county within Iowa and we calculate a benchmark index for each County we also do that for the basis within each County so if you wanted to know right now what is the the average basis or the average cash price for Boone County Iowa we calculate that for you but it's not just an average we actually enhance it because our methodology weights the index by the size or the throughput of each grain buying facility so that's the smart factor that we employ within the index methodology we then roll those calculations up so you could look at county by county and then you could compare counties why is the base is higher in this county versus vet County that to us is market intelligence that's very useful and valuable and then you could roll it up so we roll up those counties into regions state and nation so you could start doing um even larger types of analysis so you know these indexes this is kind of a new thing for the grain sector what we're trying to establish here is really a fair value calculation or in other words a a pricing benchmark for specific geographic region and that has led us to conduct a study on the usefulness of these indexes they're useful from you know one knowing what an aggregated area looks like just from a display a perspective you know we we put these prices the maps and the heat map so you can easily compare one County to another and for a grain buyer or seller that's really helpful in identifying where prices are higher or lower or basis as high or lower but there's more that can be done with the data so we put together a white paper that we just released last week which puts the data through more of a economic analysis or just just just the economic or academic sorry analysis and the conclusions we come up with sent around using our basis indexes for identifying seasonality patterns within different regions and then comparing current levels to that seasonality to know if prices or basis is stronger week that's a very strong conclusion that we've been able to draw from using our indexes and then second is part of the white paper is we've shown how the indexes can be used to predict future basis three months out and that can become a very effective tool to grain buyers grain sellers speculators for taking a forward look at what basis values might be using our underlying data I have to say I am really impressed on how hyper focused you guys are on the geographical locations mm-hmm but how much demand is there from clients for you guys to create this sure sure so you know number one this is a new this is a new thing I mean a lot of people probably have been you know people look at seasonality and keep historical logs in notebooks and spreadsheets but really what we're doing I mean this is a new thing and to get traction and to look at grain prices in this way it's not a short-term thing to take a lot of time it's going to take white papers like this it's going to take marketing it's going to take exposure but there's a lot of potential people and firms that could use this type of data it ranges from of course grain buyers you know elevators and processors of grain of course grain producers like farmers but then there's a whole slew of others ranging from AG lenders and banks to crop insurance providers folks that transport grain freight and barge they're looking at differences in geographic pricing to trading houses and food companies so there's really there's a grain I mean it's it's a huge huge huge marketplace with a lot of different types of individuals and firms that touch it so we think there's potential because of that but still to establish a new concept is it's a long-term initiative now and how we look at that is you know we offer many tools that are essential and they're you know things like data and charts and news and weather but what these indexes and other new data sets were releasing we're establishing those because we think they have value and also because we want to distinguish ourselves from the competition and these types of data and then else's you could do with them is is is what's going to make that possible hey everyone I hope you're enjoying the show so far but I want to pause and think one of our sponsors trading technologies I started using tt in the year 2000 and I loved it it is by far the best trading platform I have ever used and I've tried a lot of them with titi you can treat the global markets from virtually anywhere in the world they are the world's fastest commercially available futures trading platform I highly suggest you go try OTT especially because you can try it for free just go to try tt now.com and set up your account I want to talk about commodity view and that's your platform it's a subscription-based data and market analysis platform once again heavily focused on grain trading and I know that you guys are launching or have launched a few new pieces calling it 2.0 discuss with us what you are launching and why traders should be taking a look at this sure so if you look at the commodity suite of products you've got we've got the data exchange data we've got proprietary data we have news wires we have fundamental commodity data things like USDA production and consumption data we've got Futures Trading we have cash trading features most of those things are available individually as well as via API they also all roll up into our flagship platform commodity view and you could view all those pieces of information within commodity view you can use all of our trading functionality within commodity view and we're excited to say we're launching version 2.0 of commodity view and it has everything from an updated user interface to integration of many new data sets and also integration of software that's been disjointed from commodity view in the past so we have a platform named commodity match which is a physical grain trading platform well for a long time that platform was a standalone on its own we've now integrated that within commodity view so you don't have to operate two platforms on the heels of that we've also we also launching something called my TWU Excel where all this data and tools all the data and tools can be used within Excel giving users more flexibility and freedom and a few other things actually this is a big one new charting an entirely new charting interface within commodity view which were super excited about and then a handful of other user interface usability features user experience features making this a really big release for us so we're putting a we're putting a lot of customer training and a lot of marketing in front of this and we're really excited to get this out there ya know it is exciting and something else that you guys are doing coming up in May in Chicago you're hosting an event called commodity exchange and this is going to be a big deal for the for the AG community it's your first year doing this give all of us the details of this event yeah so commodity exchange our first year hosting this event May 8th a detent in Chicago it is you know we like bringing communities together and we think that's important for the industry so commodity exchange is doing just that for the grain industry it's bringing together grain buyers grain sellers people who offer data and technology within the grain space and there's so many new technologies from things like satellite imagery to artificial intelligence and precision farming and and big data that you know these technologies are changing the landscape of of the commodity markets new data sets like some of the mentioned are changing how things are being analyzed there's all sorts of new farm management tools coming out so we're putting together this event to bring all those things together talk about the technology and the data change in the landscape of of the grain markets and we've got institutional firms we have traders we have exchanges participating in this there's going to be a host of network out working opportunities a great lineup of panels talking about everything from ones called the new harvest AG data all the types of new data being harvested within AG and others talking about physical grain trading and the digital platforms being offered within that space and how those are evolving and others talking about innovations in grain transportation and how that's changing so really you know we're bringing together a wide variety of firms and people that are involved in the grain markets to talk about how it's changing and it's the first year for it may 8th to 10th in Chicago we can't we couldn't think of a better time or place to host such event so I'll check it out it's commodity that's C mdty exchange comm and you can see the full agenda full line of speakers and firms that are involved yeah I love that you guys are doing these live events I've attended your live events in the past actually hosted one of them and you guys just do a fantastic job of bringing traders together because once again this is a people's business and we forget about that when it's online so it's great to see people like you bar chart putting together these these great events for traders to get together and to actually talk in person yeah work at people find you guys on Twitter and give us a website to check out yes so you can find us at bar chart on Twitter and then in general you know bar chart com that's our flagship you know free financial portal data tools market analysis but you know if you have an interest more in institutional side of the business especially is say the grain side of the business take a look at SEM dty datacom commodity datacom and you could see many more details on what bar chart is offering through our commodity suite of products Marc thank you again for coming out futures radio show Anthony thanks for having me again I appreciate it thank you for listening to futures radio show if you have any questions or comments for myself or my guests please visit futures radio show comm and sign up to be a Premium Member for free if you enjoy the show don't forget to leave us a review on iTunes