TD Ameritrade Is Taking Its First Steps Towards Major Open Source Contributions

By Amit Chowdhry ● Jun 12, 2019
  • TD Ameritrade has made its first major contribution to the open source community with STUMPY
  • STUMPY is a python library to identify the patterns and anomalies in time series data

TD Ameritrade — the financial giant that provides investing services and education to more than 11 million client accounts totaling about $1.3 trillion in assets and executes an average of approximately 850,000 trades per day for clients — recently announced the creation of an open source project called STUMPY.

STUMPY is a python library to identify the patterns and anomalies in time series data. STUMPY has benefited from open source as a means to shorten development roadmaps since the early 2000s and it represents a new opportunity for TD Ameritrade to give back to the developer community.

“I am thrilled that TD Ameritrade has made its first contribution to the open source community,” said TD Ameritrade CIO Vijay Sankaran in a statement. “We see this community as a source of innovation and we are excited to see how developers outside of our organization can evolve the ideas that we’ve introduced. STUMPY is an important and exciting offering, but we also see it as the first of many contributions we’ll be making to the community on an ongoing basis in the future.”

Discovering important insights from large time series data can be a very tedious task. And tracking changes in a system’s behavior over time is time-consuming and computationally expensive.

STUMPY addresses these problems in the form of a user-friendly interface that is simple, but powerful and scalable. And the tool provides benefits for a variety of industries ranging from financial services to healthcare and beyond. And the benefits of this technology are potentially significant.

As TD Ameritrade is becoming an active participant in the open source community, TD Ameritrade is encouraging outside contribution from developers to foster new uses for this technology, which has helped them maintain its leadership position.

STUMPY is provided with a three-clause Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license for allowing developers to use the library for a wide range of applications. STUMPY was developed by TD Ameritrade’s Exploration Lab — which is one of the company’s dedicated exploratory technology teams in partnership with TD Ameritrade’s Open Source Program Office (OSPO).

STUMPY is publicly available at https://github.com/tdameritrade/stumpy.