This morning #CNBC, #Yahoo! Finance, #Robinhood, and even the #BloombergTerminal still showed #Facebook, after the corporate name changed to #Meta yesterday in an #SEC filing. The SEC had it right, of course, and so did Xignite! Accurate Corporate Actions are so critical in such fast-moving markets. Choose your #marketdata vendors wisely!

Market data is a tricky product to buy because it is intangible. It requires using and testing before you can detect the gaps and bad data points. But then comes an event like the TSLA and AAPL splits that both happened on the same day, or the Facebook corporate name change, and suddenly the missing or incorrect corporate actions data might cost you weeks of work and tens of thousands of dollars. 

It is interesting that both senior and emerging market data players missed the splits and the Facebook name change altogether. As a result, clients who depend on them for accuracy could not, and the impact on their business was probably significant. The question is how can a financial data provider really miss such wildly advertised corporate actions? Most likely, those vendors relied on their upstream provider to get the data right. And those upstream providers missed it. But what it means is that those vendors did not have either manual or automated processes in place to verify that such impactful data points would not be missing. And if you miss out on such significant market events, what else are you missing?

Corporate actions (like splits, dividends, mergers, and others) are one of the most complex aspects of market data. We have a team whose sole purpose is data quality and preventing issues. Staffing a team like this is expensive and complicated. It requires an architecture that decouples data types (pricing, corporate actions) and automatically stitches historical data based on corporate actions.

Xignite has introduced a new advanced API XigniteGlobalCorporateActions, which provides detailed corporate actions data for events such as stock splits, dividends, mergers, and spinoffs. Knowing when a company plans to offer a split or undertake an acquisition can often cause a sudden price increase or decrease and this is critical information for our investment app and buy-side and sell-side customers.

Read more about how Xignite prepared for the TSLA and AAPL stock split in this blog post