Information services giant Thomson Reuters has expanded its market data business in Asia Pacific, a sign that super-fast automated trading strategies are taking hold in the region.

The company said this morning it had launched its trading data service in the region’s main hubs of Hong Kong, Sydney and Singapore. The Elektron Real Time data feed consolidates and provides analysis on a range of pricing data from more than 400 exchanges and over-the-counter trading platforms globally. Banks, brokers and hedge funds use the data to make trading decisions.

Ralf Roth, global head of equities, feeds and platform at Thomson Reuters, said the launch of the Elektron Real Time feed in the region reflected growing demand among Asia Pacific trading participants for richer and faster data to power increasingly sophisticated automated trading strategies.

He added: “Today’s announcement shows how important the Asia Pacific region is becoming, and we also plan to expand this to India and Korea which are increasingly important markets for our clients.”

The service is already available in the developed market trading hubs of New York, Chicago, London, Frankfurt and Tokyo.

Electronic trading is growing in Asia Pacific as many US and European trading firms move into the region. Sophisticated high-speed trading strategies, such as high-frequency trading, now account for 27% and 50% of the Australia and Japan cash markets respectively, according to data from the Australian Securities and Investment Commission and the Bank of Japan. HFT is also prevalent in the region’s major futures markets of Korea and India, according to market participants.

Thomson Reuters has heavily invested in its trading data franchise in recent years and has re-engineered its distribution network to reduce the time or “latency” involved in communicating data from a trading platform to a trading firm. The company has also been at the forefront of sentiment analysis — the emerging phenomenon of sourcing information on the mood of the market by analysing hundreds of thousands of sources of public information, including social media data.

Roth said that as everyday market data becomes commoditised, firms like Thomson Reuters have to focus on enriching the data with this type of market insight and intelligence.

He said: “My vision is that in future we don’t think about data feeds but about information: data analysis in the future will be customised for clients. For example, if we could enable a client to set a trigger that if the sentiment in a certain stock reaches a certain level we give him an alert at which point he will make a trading decision- that is information, and I believe there is a large market for that. Clients are willing to pay for information that provides signals, sentiment and intelligence.”