Trading Tech Talk 56: Can a Watchlist App Be Sexy?

CTO Interview: Today we are featuring Jason Pang, CEO of Sparkfin.

He discusses:

• What is Sparkfin?
• What makes the Sparkfin Watchlist app unique?
• What was the genesis of this? Were the Sparkfin people just fed up with current watchlist offerings?
• Is the plan to remain a standalone service or to license the app to brokers as essentially a plug-and-play community module?
• Is it possible to execute through the app directly?
• Does Sparkfin offer curated lists as well? How does that work? Who curates them?
• What about paper trading / tracking? Can that be done through the app?
• Any plan to expand beyond stocks in the future?

The Inbox: Listener questions and comments

• Question from Alan Fromme - What is the future of market data? Will we ever see an era when the great monopolies are broken, and this data comes freely, or reasonably available to all?
• Question from NanFan - Caught you panel and the after show on your network. Great job particularly on the market data. I particularly enjoyed hearing the smaller firms perspective. It seems like market data is an endless black hole of costs for firms like that. Is there any hope for new firms in this space when it comes to pushing back on market data fees? Perhaps regulatory relief or a coalition of market data vendors that can push back against the exchange monopolies?