Now that’s what I call an offshore investment
MV SlipStream
Good news for those with a need for real-time financial market data at their salty fingertips while making crossing the world’s oceans: Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg services have both been benchmarked aboard ship in a proper offshore passage.
Brighton-based Beacon Electronic Trading Solutions stress-tested the Thomson Reuters Eikon and Bloomberg Anywhere products on board the motor yacht Slipstream while on passage between Gibraltar and Palma, Majorca.
The trial used the boat’s existing Sea Tel Ku band satellite broadband connection, fitted as standard to many yachts of this type. During the 30 hour sea journey of 540 nautical miles, some of which in storm force winds, the boat was well away from terrestrial GSM/3G services and were completely reliant on the satellite system for internet access.
Chris Smith, founder and senior technical consultant at Beacon ETS, said that using the yacht’s standard satellite 512k internet connection, they were able to confirm that Thomson Reuters Eikon and Bloomberg Anywhere performed “extremely well”, with 4000+ real-time instruments in Excel and full featured desktop applications. The tests were re-run numerous times during the journey, including Asian, European and US Market Open, over the variable latency link and in various weather conditions.
The crew continued their normal duties and used the shared broadband link without being affected by the market data testing.
The Sea Tel VSAT system fitted to the yacht, which was the vendor’s latest model, proved to work efficiently and provided very light bandwidth usage figures (max 200kb/s), with no loss of connectivity or features, during the testing period.
Some additional tests were also performed during the time on board Slipstream and in some pretty rough sea conditions, using an Apple Macbook Air with Oracle VirtualBox desktop virtualisation, which had “even more impressive” results, said Smith.
