Opinion

The Exchanges Strike Back

What a difference a week can make. Last week the industry was wondering what NYSE Euronext CEO Duncan Niederauer planned to purchase and he surprised us with a twofer-the American Stock Exchange (Amex) and Wombat Financial Software.

A Busy Week for the NYSE and Friends

According to Benjamin Disraeli, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Allow me to add another category-rumors. Sometimes these rumors get swept under the carpet; other times they turn out to be true. Take, for example, the New York Stock Exchange,…

And Then There Were Five?

According to press reports, NYSE Euronext chairman Duncan Neiderauer is following in his predecessor's footsteps with the rumored purchase of the American Stock Exchange (Amex), one of the few non-demutualized exchanges left in the U.S.

Will "Caring" Exchanges Prevent Flight to MTFs?

We've barely begun 2008, yet already our front page is filled with news from the participants in what will be one of the key battlegrounds for this year-the struggle for trading volumes between exchanges, ECNs and new, multiple dealer-backed venues,…

New Year, Old Challenges

The beginning of every January brings that short, but brilliant, burst of collective optimism that this year will be better than last year: Business will pick up, IT will have enough resources to meet all the demands placed upon it by the business lines…

Welcome Back... and Welcome!

I was fortunate to be invited to spend the holidays this year in the company of friends in the San Francisco area. On Christmas Day, I was presented with a gift marked "from Satan." A typo, I wondered? Is Santa dyslexic? Sadly no-the gift that emerged…

Taming the Wild, Wild Web

In the last couple of years, the Internet has become pervasive and global, spawning an exciting generation of Web 2.0 applications like podcasts, blogs, wikis, P2P social networking, Semantic Web mashups, and 3D virtual worlds. The latest consumer…

Managing Reference Data in the Asia-Pacific Market

While firms in Europe and the US typically operate under one or a few regimes with specific data requirements, Asia-Pacific firms frequently trade in most of the local domiciles, requiring different market, customer and instrument data, says Coexis's…

Editor’s Letter - All grown up

December and January editor's letters in just about every magazine ranging from Calligraphy Monthly to GQ are almost certain to carry either a retrospective analysis of the year that's been or a prospective view of the year to come... or both. Perhaps…

The party's over

Like other sectors of the financial services industry, hedge fund and buy-side managers took quite a beating in 2007, and the carnage is expected by all but the most obstinately optimistic observers to continue well into 2008. Despite recent short…

The bust of 2008

Making predictions can be either an embarrassing or an enlightening exercise. A recent blog posting that made the Incisive Media rounds last month was a reproduction of a page from a 1900-era edition of the Ladies' Home Journal . In the gloriously dense…

A Market Data Christmas Carol

After returning home from the FISD's holiday party last week, I was woken by the sounds of a horrible wailing and the noise of chains dragging on the ground as the specter of late, great market data manager Jake Marley appeared before me.

No Rest for the Wicked

Given how much end users and data vendors complain about the burgeoning Opra feed of US options data, you might think they would have been grateful for a little respite. Not so, apparently, because when a double-punch hardware and software failure…

Bad Credit? You're Fired!

We've all seen the TV ads: "Bad credit? No credit? No problem! Call 1-800-LOAN-SHARK." ... Or something like that. But could this year's credit crunch have more personal ramifications? Apparently, because at a briefing hosted by sibling Inside Reference…

Redeemable Shares: A Cautionary Tale

Redeemable shares might be a tax-efficient method to distribute capital, but they can be a headache for firms trying to automate corporate actions processing, say Richard Ryndak and Kristina Kulle at Wolters Kluwer Financial Services

Editor's letter: The link between Van Gogh and CDOs

The notion of spending large fortunes, equivalent to the GDP of a small African country, on a Van Gogh painting, is frankly, absurd. The intrinsic value of a Van Gogh - Sunflowers, Irises, The Starry Night or otherwise - is only a few dollars. Paintings…

The year of hedging dangerously

As the calendar winds down, I don't know whether it's more reassuring to look ahead or to look back. This was a rough year. While not entirely an annus horribilis , it was one that traders, IT staffers and industry observers will remember for the lessons…

A fragmented future

The introduction of multi-lateral trading facilities, crossing networks and electronic communication networks are starting to hurt Europe's well-established exchanges. This phenomenon is likely to become somewhat more acute with the recent introduction…

The end of an illusion

It's getting ugly out there. That's hardly surprising news, but still arguably shocking. The Great Credit Crunch of 2007 has now officially expanded beyond the first wave of casualties - hedge funds over-exposed to shadily structured mortgage-backed…

Thanksgiving and Turkeys

Thanksgiving, the quintessential American holiday, stems from the first harvest gathered by British pilgrim settlers after being taught how to hunt and grow native crops in the New World by Native Americans. As the story goes, having survived their first…

Achtung, Baby!

Retired Formula 1 racing champ Michael Schumacher returned to a Ferrari for testing duties last week, and promptly put his younger rivals in the shade. However, Schumi is the exception to the rule: in the market data industry, older inevitably means…

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