Imagine arriving at a football match after the final whistle and being handed only the score. You know who won. You have no idea how. A stock’s closing price presents much the same problem. It leaves out the orders, cancellations, quotes and fleeting opportunities that made the result possible. OneMarketData has built its business around keeping that missing match.
- OneTick captures and analyzes the market’s fine-grained record.
- Its customers include trading firms, banks, exchanges and regulators.
- Cloud data, execution analytics and surveillance share the same foundation.
- Since September 2025, OneMarketData has been combined with KX.
A price is only the ending
In market-data language, a tick is an individual update: a trade, a quote, a change in an order book. Collect enough of them and you can reconstruct the conditions surrounding a decision. Was liquidity available? Had the quoted price moved? Did an order disappear before anyone could trade against it? These questions need a sequence, rather than a daily average.
OneTick combines a time-series database with event processing and financial analytics. It captures, compresses and archives data, then lets users query historical records and analyze incoming events. Its built-in functions understand trading tasks such as joining trades to prevailing quotes and reconstructing order books. The expertise lives partly in those functions: work an institution would otherwise have to write and maintain itself.
The engineer who kept the context
Founder Leonid Frants came from the places where these questions were expensive. Before OneMarketData, he spent more than 15 years building financial-data systems at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. His Goldman work included connecting tick data with corporate actions, symbol changes and other reference information. A price history becomes rather less useful when yesterday’s ticker and today’s ticker cannot be recognized as the same company.
Founded in 2005, the company sells to institutions: hedge funds, proprietary traders, brokers, asset managers and market operators. Its public client roster includes Optiver, Vanguard, CME Group and Tradeweb. That mix explains the breadth of the product. A researcher tests a strategy against history; an execution team compares trades with market benchmarks. Both need records that agree about what happened, and when.
The customer who asks harder questions
Then there is the customer whose job is to question everyone else. In November 2023, the UK Financial Conduct Authority selected OneTick for its core market surveillance and visualization system. The competitive tender involved 15 providers. The cloud service was intended to help detect potential insider dealing and manipulation, monitor disruption and support oversight of suspicious transaction and order reporting.
providers in the FCA tender that selected OneTick.Selection announced November 2023.
Here the market’s memory serves an investigator. OneTick Surveillance provides alerts, investigation workflows and order-book replay. An unusual pattern can be examined against the surrounding activity. That distinction matters: an alert starts a review; it does not establish misconduct. A useful system must help a human follow the evidence, explain the pattern and decide what deserves further attention.
Buying the history
A database still needs something worth querying. In 2015, OneMarketData acquired Tick Data, a specialist in historical intraday information, for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition paired an analytics engine with prepared content. Frants described a market adopting a “Services approach.” OneTick Cloud had launched that year. Customers could buy access to data and analysis together, reducing the work of assembling the ingredients.
The deal also involved a change of intention. Contemporary reporting said Tick Data had initially been looking for strategic partners, while OneMarketData had been seeking content to license. The opportunity to own key assets brought them together. That is a useful detail for anyone building technical products: sometimes the obstacle to adoption sits next to the software, in the material customers must obtain before they can use it.
Today, OneTick Cloud advertises more than 200 equity, futures and options markets, with some trade and quote history reaching back to 1993. Users can work through Python, SQL or REST, or retrieve CSV and Parquet files. A partnership announced with Options Technology in January 2024 added a fully managed cloud proposition combining market data and analytics.
The cost lives between the systems
OneMarketData’s cloud datasheet offers a revealing customer example. An unnamed global ETF issuer had systems that could not combine real-time feeds with basket data or support its next-day analytics needs. The blockage was the connection between inputs. OneTick Cloud supplied real-time ingestion, streaming basket calculations and Python-accessible analysis. The company reports reduced operational overhead, without publishing a quantified saving.
For buyers, the commercial calculation extends beyond software. OneMarketData sells commercial platforms, cloud subscriptions, regulatory applications and implementation services. A meaningful quote needs a defined dataset, exchange permissions and deployment scope. Integration, monitoring and training belong in the budget. Its professional-services menu covers precisely those jobs. A small project needing only occasional daily prices would have little reason to reproduce this institutional machinery.
The practical lesson: test the whole path from an incoming event to an answer someone can defend.
Two toolkits, one company
In September 2025, KX and OneMarketData merged under KX chief executive Ashok Reddy. KX’s kdb+ had been a separate option in time-series analytics; now the announced ambition is a shared foundation across research, trading and compliance. Nasdaq remains an alternative for surveillance. Internally assembled data platforms remain another route. OneTick’s case rests on combining financial data, ready-made analytics and applications.
The newer additions address familiar friction. OneTick Cloud’s MCP tools help users find coverage, inspect schemas and generate query code. TrueTick, offered through a private preview, tests market-data quality. Buyers can copy the underlying discipline: choose a difficult trading day, check the inputs, reconstruct an order and inspect the answer. Speed means little if nobody trusts the replay.