This hedge fund created an Excel on steroids

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. London-based Man Group is beginning to commercialize its ArcticDB tool for analyzing a lot of data quickly. A tool for crunching billions of rows and millions of columns of data is the stuff of nightmares for some.

For London-based hedge fund Man Group, it was a dream. When the firm couldn’t find something on the market to, for example, consistently and quickly pull and analyze the entire universe of daily stock prices for all time, it sought to make it a reality. The result is ArcticDB, an open-source tech tool the firm developed internally over the course of a decade and is beginning to commercialize now among customers like financial software and media company Bloomberg.

Bloomberg signed on in 2023 and has been working with Man Group to build on the tool ever since. “I do think there’s a big shift in the financial markets and especially the capital markets, this awareness that our customers need to be able to leverage large data and more and more data sets, and they need to build more rigorous models," Bloomberg Chief Technology Officer Shawn Edwards said. Man Group was founded in 1783 and managed about $175 billion in assets as of last September.

The “tic" in its ArcticDB refers to tick data, or the minute individual price changes that occur every time a stock is traded, sometimes just microseconds apart. The tool was designed to handle the enormous stream of tick data that comes in every day, though it can also use daily or weekly stock price data. “Think of it as like an industrial-scale crunching of enormous things that look a bit like Excel spreadsheets," said Man Group Chief Technology Officer Gary Collier, referring to Microsoft’s ubiquitous spreadsheet tool.