Skip to main content

ICE Is Set To Satiate The Appetite For Data


 Intercontinental Exchange, Inc (ICE) operates many of the worlds most well know stock exchanges including the NYSE. Intuitively, the majority of their revenue would come from transaction fees based on the volume of trades on their exchanges, however they have positioned themselves extraordinarily well to serve delivery data services to all different types of asset managers and traders. Data services, which in 2012 only made up 15.8%, now composes 33% of revenue and is their main source of growth.

Their competitive advantage comes in the form of their ownership of exchanges.; a tough economic moat to overcome for the competition trying to provide similar data. Data is an ambiguous term, so what specifically are they able to provide?
·      Pricing and reference data
·      Exchange data
·      Analytics
·      Feeds
 All helping investors make more informed decisions.

Their exchanges cover 11 different asset classes, which gives them a wide range of potential clients. Data is becoming more and more valuable to asset managers because it could allow them to get a competitive advantage in an extremely competitive market. As finance becomes increasingly quantitative, ICE’s data services will be the go-to resource for the most accurate trading data.  Year over year, ICE’s revenue from data services more than doubled from $871m to $1978m through organic and inorganic growth. As ICE continues to evolve their product offerings to meet the needs of asset managers, I believe that their data services will overtake their Transaction revenue as the leading source of income.


The demand for data is growing, and ICE has a competitive advantage to provide the most up to date and relevant data. They are also actively working to expand this area, investing in new offerings to meet the growing needs. I believe this segment will provide high margin growth going forward for an otherwise stagnant business.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Base Case Is Bullish For HealthSouth

HealthSouth Corporation (Ticker: HLS) operates post-acute rehabilitation centers across the country, with locations more focused in the southern U.S. Their business model is quite simple, they provide physical rehabilitation services based either in their facilities or at an individual’s home. As of December 31, 2014 they acquired Encompass, which broadens their care base to both home health and hospice. Home health provides assistance for individuals at home who require aid in their daily lives, while hospice care is for individuals with terminal diagnoses. HealthSouth’s business model is extremely dependent on their employees, and as a result they have limited economies of scale. Margins are also pretty standard, as Medicare only gives a ‘market basket’ price increase and HealthSouth itself gives their employees an equivalent increase in salary. The business model is extremely dependent on the quality of people they have interacting with and treating patients. HealthSouth unde...
9 comments
Read more

Digi International Makes A Convincing Argument For Growth

  Digi International is a small player in in the internet-of-things and connectivity space. With a market cap of just over $300 million they struggle to compete and innovate with the larger, more well funded companies such as HP. While their core business has been stagnant, they have positioned themselves to launch into an underserved and growing market through 3 small acquisitions. Over the past two years and as recently as January 2017, Digi has acquired Bluenica, Freshtemps and Smart Temps. Combined with Digi’s hardware manufacturing and cloud based platforms, their ‘Digi Cold’ suite of products allows restaurants, pharmacies, grocery stores and food services to remotely and automatically monitor the temperature of their cold storage. The current food safety procedure requires the aforementioned industries to physically check the temperature of their fridge or food, record it by hand on a piece of paper and then upload it to a spreadsheet or similar form of data stor...
2 comments
Read more

Setup For A Correction?

Today we are seeing volatility return to the market. As I write, the S&P 500 and Dow are down 2.08% and 2.39% respectively. Over the past week the VIX has risen over 40%, coming off of a period of historically low closes. While today is exciting, the real story will be told when the markets re-open on Monday. The setup today feels like a familiar story in this historic bull-run. An unforeseen political action, in this case the release of the GOP Surveillance memo, followed by a subsequent decline in the markets. Historically, shares have shown to be resilient; recovery from the surprise Brexit vote took less than 2 weeks for the S&P 500.   The term ‘buy the dip’ has come to characterize our current market. Moving towards the close today and during the open on Monday we will see if the sentiment for buying these pullbacks has shifted. Over the past week I have read second hand reports of brokers having difficulty selling volume in the market. In other wo...
1 comment
Read more