Premium Data Products Support Corporate
HOME > Products & Services > Data Tools > Introduction >
Introduction
- The Service
> The Software

Market Coverage
- Futures Overview
- Futures Layout
- Futures Coverage Detail
- Spot/Cash Prices
- Historical Data
- Update Schedule

Getting Started
- Price
- Subscribe
- Free Trial

The Software

"DataTools" is designed to work under the Windows environment. For it to work satisfactorily, your machine will need to have (at least):

  • a Pentium microprocessor
  • Windows 7 (or higher)
  • 2GB of free disk space
  • 1GB of RAM
  • Broadband internet access

Continuous Contracts

The DataTools full futures history comes with continuous contracts ready-made according to the program's default roll settings. In addition, the software provides some flexibility for the underlying roll settings to be changed to suit personal requirements. The rolls are determined by a date algorithm (roll on this day of this month) according to a schedule that can be edited.

Continuous contracts are produced in two forms - "Back-Adjusted" and "Spliced" - and are updated automatically as part of the daily update routine.

Contract Details and Pricing

If you buy 3 Live Cattle contracts on the CME, and the price goes from 77.53 to 80.00, how much would you make in Australian Dollars? DataTools can answer this question because it stores and displays information about contract specifications and foreign exchange rates to enable the necessary calculations to be made.

The "Contract Details and Pricing" module also allows you look up details of all the futures contracts covered in the service (market name, symbol, exchange, session, contract currency etc.).

Risk Management

As a corollary to the Contract Pricing module, DataTools offers a Risk Management module where you can work out how many to contracts to trade in any international market for a given level of risk. Just specify an entry price, a stop price and the amount to risk (in any of the supported currencies) and the function returns the appropriate number of contracts.

In addition, there is a "Risk Equaliser" which allows you to compare markets on the basis of recent volatility, tick size and exchange rates. For instance, if you're accustomed to trading e-mini S&P 500 contracts in lots of 3, how many e-mini S&P MidCap 400 contracts offer the same degree of exposure? The Risk Equaliser can be used to calculate how many contracts to trade on each side of any inter-market spread - e.g. between U.S. 10-year Notes and Australian 10-year Bonds.

Rapid Charting

DataTools has a simple charting module included inside. There is no "technical analysis" functionality - but navigation between markets and deliveries is quick and easy as the module is automatically linked to the futures database. Prices can be viewed either in Chart or in Table form.