SIRCA are seeking submissions for the 2018 Philip Brown Prize.

SIRCA proudly sponsors the Philip Brown Prize to acknowledge the significant contributions of Philip Brown in the establishment of SIRCA and the work he did in developing databases used for finance and accounting research.

The Philip Brown Prize award recognises the best-published paper in an A* journal in the previous calendar year using SIRCA data and is awarded through recommendation from SIRCA’s Membership and Research Committee (MRC).

This year the winner of the Philip Brown Prize for 2018 will be announced in July, 2019 at the Accounting & Finance Association of Australia & New Zealand (AFAANZ) conference in Brisbane.

The use of authorised SIRCA data must be cited within the paper. To submit an application, email a full PDF version of the paper to philip-brown-prize@sirca.org.au by 18/06/2019.

BY DAVID MYTON | POSTED ON APRIL 3, 2019

A presentation underway at the recent SIRCA Young Researchers Workshop

Eleven young researchers from universities across Australia and New Zealand took the spotlight recently to demonstrate how they were finding new ways of using data in the areas of finance and accounting.

The occasion was the eighth annual SIRCA Young Researchers Workshop for PhD candidates and recently-completed graduates, held at the University of Technology, Sydney.

A young researcher must currently be working on a PhD or have finished it within the past five years.

Universities represented the two-day function included the University of New South Wales, University of Technology, Sydney, Monash University, Australian National University, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, University of Western Australia, University of Queensland, and New Zealand’s Massey University.

These universities are subscribers to SIRCA data collections, which the young researchers accessed for their projects.

The event saw the young researchers explaining their papers for 15 minutes, engaging for 10 minutes with their appointed Discussant – senior academics from University of Technology, Sydney, Wollongong University, University of New South Wales, La Trobe, and the University of Sydney – followed by five minutes for questions from other academics and researchers.

The presenters, their topics and academic Discussants were:

• Duc Man Nguyen – University of Technology, Sydney ETFs and anomalies? (Discussant Doug Foster, University of Sydney)
• Bao Doan – University of New South Wales – Distinct roles of risk and uncertainty: Evidence from trading around U.S. macro news (Discussant Dave Michayluck – University of Technology, Sydney)
• Mark Wallis – University of Queensland  The Pricing of Disclosure Quality in the Bond Market (Discussant Stephen Taylor – University of Technology, Sydney
• Baoqing Gan – University of Technology, Sydney – Sensitivity to Sentiments: Social vs News Media Impacts on Stock Markets – A comparison using textual analysis (Discussant Terry Walter – University of Wollongong)
• Man Duy Pham – University of Western Australia  Management Connectedness and Corporate Investment (Discussant Mark Humphery-Jenner University of New South Wales)
• Arseny Gorbenko – University of New South Wales Rationally Neglected Stocks (Discussant Jerry Parwada – University of New South Wales)
• Harvey Nguyen – Massey University – Earnings Announcement Lottery Payoffs and the Cross-section of Stock Returns (Discussant Petko Kalev – LaTrobe University
• Xiaolu Hu – Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Shopping the rating: Evidence from Chinese corporate bond market (Discussant Kathy Walsh – University of Technology, Sydney)
• Michael Wang – Monash University Blockholder Activism and Stock Price Information Quality (Discussant Danika Wright – University of Sydney)
• Wanyun Li – Australia National University Effects of Social Media Discussions on Management Earnings Guidance (Discussant Andrew Jackson – University of New South Wales)
• Anum Malik – Massey University Conceptualising Style Drift (Discussant Lorenzo Casavecchia – University of Technology, Sydney)

Many of the Discussant roles and reviewers for the academic papers were facilitated by the Financial Research Network (FIRN).

Adam Catarius, SIRCA Product Manager, said all the papers were of a high standard while several were “absolute stand-outs”.

“These papers had great, fresh ideas, and close to publication standard,” he said.

“The Young Researchers are pretty passionate and they all think that their area of research is extremely beneficial.

“Any criticism they received was always honest and constructive, with the academics trying to just help push them in the correct direction so they can achieve their goal of publication. It’s a great opportunity to get expert feedback.”

* The inaugural Mardi Dungey Memorial Award for the best overall presenter, paper and young researcher who contributed the most during the Young Researchers Workshop was presented to Michael (Jun) Wang from Monash University. The Award is named in honour of Professor Mardi Dungey, Professor of Economics and Finance at the University of Tasmania, who passed away in January this year.

The CMCRC-SIRCA merger continues to create new benefits for partners and customers. For over 20 years, RoZetta Technology has developed customised commercial solutions to load, transform, store, secure, analyse and link data sets.
RoZetta’s cloud-based data-intensive technology solutions and information services can be delivered at scale, helping partners and customers solve complex problems, achieve business outcomes, drive innovation and value creation, and unlock new opportunities. These solutions include the revolutionary Thomson Reuters Tick History (TRTH) platform. Used by 90% of the world’s largest banks and 80% of the world’s largest hedge funds, TRTH stores over three petabytes of data and processes more than 10 billion transactions every trading day. RoZetta’s capability grows Now part of the CMCRC-SIRCA Group, adding analytical expertise to technology innovations, RoZetta develops world-leading solutions for:

• Financial markets and services
• Tertiary education
• Government
• Healthcare
• Property and real estate
• Retail and FMCG
• Agribusiness
• Energy and utilities
• Telecommunications and CSPs

And as a newly appointed Amazon Web Services Advanced Consulting Partner, RoZetta is able to offer even more benefits to partners and customers. “Thanks to our AWS-enabled cloud-based solutions, our customers don’t have to worry about maintaining expensive infrastructure,” said Peter Spicer, Chief Technology Officer at RoZetta. “We can not only efficiently manage massive amounts of data, but we also extract value from it – providing outstanding commercial outcomes for our partners.” Discover the benefits of a RoZetta Technology solution

Guests from government, academia and business helped celebrate the merger of SIRCA and CMCRC with the 10th anniversary of Vivid as a fitting back drop.

It is great sharing with you the excitement generated at our joint Sydney Vivid event where we announced the merger of RoZetta/SIRCA and CMCRC.

This merger brings together two organisations with very similar charters and the same commitment to using data to bring transparency and equity to key markets.

These companies have developed and deployed game changing solutions that have brought transparency and efficiency to capital markets transactions around the world.  They are both leading innovators in using big data and advanced analytics in capital markets, health, energy and logistics.

Minister Craig Laundy announcing the merger

In announcing the merger Minister Laundy said “It’s not just vertical integration, it’s horizontal integration at the same time, which will provide some real grunt, especially when it comes to data and data analytics, training PhD students, and collaboration with industry” He then added “What this merger will deliver to this country moving forward, not just for the PhD students moving up and out into the world, are the benefits that are limited only by your imagination. You’re the sort of people we in government wish we could find more of to back.” This merger will result in the establishment of an unrivalled centre of excellence for analytical innovation in Australia.  Federal Minister Craig Laundy was clear in his support of the merger as it provides a showcase for Australia to play a key role in commercialising the innovation developed by our universities and the wider research community in collaboration with industry and government. Both SIRCA and CMCRC, have a commitment to support academic researchers through the provision of data and technology platforms, to solve complex problems in complex markets.  The merged entity will continue to support and grow the unique industrial PhD program which delivers meaningful outcomes for its commercial partners and is positioned well to develop data scientists to feed growing global demand. David Sharp, CEO, RoZetta and SIRCA https://www.rozettatechnology.com/ https://www.sirca.org.au/ https://www.cmcrc.com/  

Australia’s world-leading position in tracking and interpreting big data to create fairer, better-quality markets to be amplified
Capital Markets CRC and SIRCA’s innovation in data analysis, technologies, products and solutions, including the Thomson Reuters Tick History product, the SMARTS Trade Surveillance system and Lorica Health’s claims analytics, is already transforming capital markets, health markets, energy markets and property markets
Merger further amplifies impact of revolutionary Industrial PhD program and of participating Australian Universities

14^th June 2018: Two Australian research centres already responsible for some of the biggest innovations in making stock exchanges, health markets and energy markets fairer, more efficient and less able to be manipulated are to merge, creating a global translational research powerhouse based in Sydney.

From the revolutionary Tick History solution created and run for Thomson Reuters, which transformed the transparency of trading and market surveillance, and the SMARTS Trade Surveillance system, which was sold to Nasdaq in 2010, through to Lorica Health’s claims analytics platform and the MQDashboard, Capital Markets CRC (https://cmcrc.info/) and SIRCA (https://www.sirca.org.au/) already have successfully launched multiple world-leading innovations.

In addition to advanced analytics and creating new technologies, both organisations provide world-leading translational research and training opportunities for PhD students, teams and university partners; actionable insights and solutions for industrial partners; and impressive proof of the success of the Federal Government’s CRC program.

Federal Minister, the Hon. Craig Laundy announced the planned merger of CMCRC and SIRCA, highlighting the significant benefits of the combined ability to create new big data analytic technologies and solutions to better manage the growing volume and complexity of market data.

“It’s not just vertical integration, it’s horizontal integration at the same time, which will provide some real grunt, especially when it comes to data and data analytics, training PhD students, and collaboration with industry,” Minister Laundy said.

“What this merger will deliver to this country moving forward, not just for the PhD students moving up and out into the world, and the benefits that we’ll have as a country moving forward, is limited only by your imagination. You’re the sort of people we in government wish we could find more of to back.”

The new not-for-profit global hub to be based in Sydney will:

• • significantly increase the scale and capacity to :

  • deliver world-leading translational research and industry engagement, resulting in solutions, products and new companies that will enhance the fairness and efficiency of global markets (or “Market Quality”)

  • develop and provide relevant global data and advanced tools to promote and enable financial research and innovation, particularly by member universities.

  • expand the world’s largest cross-disciplinary industrial PhD program producing future R&D leaders in data science, finance, market quality and market design

  • bring together and leverage a community of around 70 industry partners, 50 universities, over 250 experts and 12 companies in our corporate family;

  • provide expert teams who will deliver value to industry by solving their problems and generating impact and outcomes for our university partners and students.

The new entity combines a track record of demonstrable success in translational research and bringing innovation to capital and securities markets, health markets, energy markets, facilities management, digital assets, supply chain logistics and financial research.

CMCRC Chair Dr David Skellern said the merger strengthens Australia’s leadership position in translational research into how data can be leveraged to improve markets.

“This merger consolidates two of the leading translational research organisations in the area of market structures and regulation, data intelligence (mining, analytics, visualisation and utilisation), technology development and innovation to solve many of the biggest problems facing government, business and consumers,” Dr Skellern said.

“The Federal Government’s National Science and Innovation Agency has set out the challenge Australia faces in moving from the bottom rung of nations in university-to-industry collaboration. CMCRC has been a shining light in the movement to change that status quo and this merger means increased scale and capability to make a far greater impact.”

SIRCA Chair Andrew Macpherson said that SIRCA had been extremely successful in serving the needs of a large number of universities over the past 21 years and in providing some of the largest and most innovative data services to global corporate clients, such as the Thomson Reuters Tick History Product.

“By joining forces with CMCRC, SIRCA achieves not only a continuation of delivery of the SIRCA mission but a significant expansion of its scale and capability to bring new benefits to members, and the wider university and industry sectors we serve,” Mr Macpherson said.

“Both CMCRC and SIRCA have the same mission – to enhance the research outputs of the Australian economy by developing, delivering and enhancing the industrial research collaborations, research infrastructure and capabilities and connectedness of universities, industry and government, making markets better and unlocking value in data.

“Both CMCRC and SIRCA have proven track records in building global solutions leveraging data, analytics and technology. As a single entity, our ability to continue our expansion into markets like health, energy and property is exponentially increased. By creating market efficiencies across these markets at a global level, we will increase the value for end users and identify ways that providers can optimise their cost base.”

The CMCRC will continue to deliver on all of its obligations to the Commonwealth and participants under the Cooperative Research Centres Program, and SIRCA will continue to provide access to global data and tools to its member base.

The combined organisation’s headquarters will be co-located with a new data research and technology community across three floors in Sydney, with branches in China and Europe supporting a global network of over 70 industry partners across five continents.

The merger is subject to finalisation of due diligence verification and legal approvals, which the Boards expect to complete quickly.

Media Contact: LJ Loch 0488 038 555 or via ljloch@alphaconsulting.global

About SIRCA

SIRCA (https://www.sirca.org.au/about-sirca/) was founded in 1997 by a group of collaborating Australian and New Zealand universities as a not for profit company to support the needs of academic researchers, in a world where data volumes were accelerating dramatically. RoZetta Technology is the commercial arm of SIRCA and is a world leader in a number of areas of technology related to financial services including understanding financial instrument data structures, managing the ingestion of significant financial market-data streams and managing large-scale archival financial market data sets.

About CMCRC

CMCRC was established in 2001 and has grown to become a leading international translational research institute with over 60 industry partners in 5 continents and operating a globally leading industrial PhD program currently developing over 100 future R&D leaders. CMCRC is supported by the Department of Industry and Science’s Cooperative Research Centre Program (www.business.gov.au).

CMCRC is sustained and refreshed by developing, funding and growing a number of high-profile successes including Thomson Reuters Tick History; SMARTS Stock Market Surveillance acquired by NASDAQ in 2010; Lorica Health (advanced claims analytics solutions and services for the healthcare sector (www.loricahealth.com) ). Other portfolio companies include: Ordermentum (www.ordermentum.com), CIM Environmental (www.cimenviro.com), Digicash
(www.digicash.com), Infinigold (http://www.infinigold.com/), Dealmax (www.dealmax.com.au) and Market Quality Dashboard (www.mqdashboard.com)

 

 

 

 

Craig Laundy and David Wright are joined by David Sharp, CEO of Securities Industry Research Centre of Asia-Pacific (SIRCA) and RoZetta Technology Craig Laundy, Federal Minister has announced RoZetta’s parent company, Capital Market Cooperative Research Centre (CMCRC), Australia’s world-leading translational research institute, and Securities Industry Research Centre of Asia-Pacific (SIRCA) have agreed to merge to create a leading global data science and technology hub.  The merged entity will have a demonstrable record in successfully delivering innovation to a broad range of market sectors including capital and securities markets, health, energy, facilities management, digital assets, supply chain logistics and financial research markets. The merger delivers significantly more scale to support:

• World leading data and analytics solutions leading to innovation that result in disruptive products and processes;
• New companies that will emerge to enhance the fairness and efficiency of global markets for all participants;
• Expansion of the world’s largest cross-disciplinary industrial PhD Program producing the future R&D leaders in data-science, finance, health, market quality and market design;
• A community of around 70 industry partners, 50 Universities, more than 250 experts in their fields and 12 companies in our corporate family;
• A resource pool of over 300 professionals, expert in big data management and advanced analytics;
• Expert consulting team who will create value for clients by identifying, and resolving, waste and inefficiencies in processes, systemic errors and non-compliant behaviours.

SIRCA / RoZetta and CMCRC have both transformed global industries with successful initiatives including the Tick History product (now part of Thomson Reuters) and CMCRC’s SMARTS product (now part of NASDAQ.) These products transformed the way global capital markets operate. Companies already fostered by these organisations include health analytics leader Lorica Health and data services company RoZetta Technologies. The new entity will continue to translate the benefits of advanced data management and data analytics into measurable benefits for clients. The new entity will bring together complementary skill sets in cloud centric big data platform solutions combined with advanced data analytics and product development skills. This new entity will be a real centre of excellence for analytical innovation. David Sharp, CEO, RoZetta Technology and SIRCA https://www.rozettatechnology.com/ https://www.sirca.org.au/ https://www.cmcrc.com/

Please note the SIRCA office will be closed from Friday 22 December, 2017 and will reopen on Tuesday 2 January, 2018.

During this time SIRCA staff will not be available for all general enquiries or customer service. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

We wish you a happy holiday season and look forward to working with you in 2018.

We want to hear from you, our members, on what is important to you. In the process, we will be giving away a Google Home Mini to to three lucky SIRCA Gateway users.

To enter the draw for the giveaway please fill out this brief 2 minute survey. Please note you MUST be a registered user of SIRCA Gateway. If you haven’t registered or received an email inviting you to register for Gateway you can contact us and we’ll help you gain Gateway access right away. Details will also posted to our Facebook and LinkedIn page.

Bring Your Own Data (BYOD) Beta

We are very pleased to announce that we will be launching our BYOD Beta Version soon.

BYOD functionality in Gateway will provide our members the ability to upload their own data into Gateway and create their own private table to link to other data tables. BYOD adds the extra convenience for users to bring their data analytics in one place, at the same time exploiting massive computing power provided by Gateway.

If you would like to be involved and one of the first users to try out this new feature, please contact us here.

Since our release of SIRCA Gateway we are pleased to share our latest updates, which include new custom functions, notebook examples and new data releases. For this month’s Gateway Tips and Tricks video we’ve focused on Australian Company Announcements.

Important reminder, our Legacy Portal will be decommissioned on 31 December 2017, please ensure you’ve registered for SIRCA Gateway. Please contact us here if you require any assistance with the registration process.

Morningstar monthly data is now available up to August 2017. The following Data Collections have been updated:

1. Price (Market Capitalisation Database)
2. Company Fundamentals
3. Corporate Actions
4. Returns
5. Reference
6. Company Ownership
7. Corporate Governance
8. Property
9. Returns

ACA

Users of SIRCA’s Australian Company Announcements (ACA) service will be pleased to learn SIRCA has transferred the entire ACA collection to Gateway, where processing speeds are greatly reduced. The entire ACA collection can now be searched in a matter of minutes in Gateway. Boolean searching (AND, OR, NOT) within announcements is supported in Gateway, thanks to some clever behind the scenes Python programming, which only requires a user to specify the search criteria. A range of notebooks have been created and shared with all Gateway users, so everyone can quickly master the new methods – a Simple_Extraction notebook, which lets users make choices via a more traditional fixed format interface; a standard Notebook, demonstrating various common search requests in the very flexible Gateway manner; and an Advanced notebook, with an example where ACA targeted announcements are merged with intra-day prices to supply the raw elements of an event study. We invite you to experiment for yourself with these sample notebooks and to experience the ease with which Gateway works with Australian Company Announcements. To access, register now.

ASX Broker Trades Service

1. SIRCA’s new ASX Broker Trades Service provides the Course of Sales data on a T+3 basis, with broker specific information fully disclosed.
2. It contains a complete record of every trade transaction on every instrument, which is invaluable for maintaining a complete market history.
3. The Basis of Quotation information is also available in this Service. The data for the ASX Broker Trades Service commences from January 2017.

ASX Broker Trades Service are only available in SIRCA Gateway and not in the Legacy Portal. Click here to here to register for SIRCA Gateway.

A summary of the most recent changes include:

1. Morningstar data collection updated for August.
2. New ASX Broker Trade Data now included in our Price Data Collection.
3. GetContent Feature available now for Australian Company Announcements.
4. Australian Company Announcements (ACA) has been added to Gateway, including new features to facilitate deeper analysis.
5. SIRCA Gateway now has ASX ITCH raw data in csv format which has been included within the Price data collection. This data source is not normalised, preserving the ITCH message as received from ASX. We are currently working on generating a full order book view.
6. Bulk download function has been added.

Tip of the Month

Using the Metadata search in Company Announcement, users can download up to 120,000 records at a time. This means that users can practically download an entire years worth of announcements metadata or the metadata associated with a company’s results announcement for the entire history at one time.
This compares favourably to the limit of 5,000 records in the legacy portal. For more information, the ACA standard notebook in Gateway demonstrates how to use the Metadata search.

We have added short 2 minute videos covering the following:

1. How to conduct a simple download with ACA.
2. Creating a notebook in Gateway
3. Using a notebook in Gateway
4. Linking two data tables in Gateway
5. Bulk download data

You can access them here.
In addition to our SIRCA Gateway Tips & Tricks we also have helpful SIRCA WebLearn tutorials, which will help you get started with SIRCA Gateway. Please click here to access the videos.