Feature

Life, the Universe and STAC

Selecting which new technology to adopt is often more of an art than a science for most investment banks. The lack of objective benchmarks has left departments making choices based more on personal relationships with salespeople than on the technology…

Making Hay While the Sun Shines

Speaking with financial technologists lately, most aren't too concerned about the sub-prime mortgage meltdown. "As long as you're making the bank money, it will take care of you," has been a common refrain.

So Passes the Old Order

A part of history ended last week as the Boston Stock Exchange, the third oldest exchange in the U.S. behind the Philadelphia Stock Exchange (PHLX) and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), closed its doors for equities trading after being in business for…

Microsoft to Do Turrets?

When Microsoft clears its throat, other vendors get nervous. With its recent acquisition of persistent group-chat vendor Parlano last week, Microsoft has added another key component for its unified messaging offering, Office Communications Server 2007…

Sticking point – Feature. Joel Clark looks at the state of play regarding the post-trade processing of credit derivatives on the buy side, and concludes that, although significant recent efforts have been made by vendors and consortiums in this space, tru

Even though straight-through processing (STP) has been a reality for equities and fixed-income trading for some time, automating the back-office processing of credit derivatives remains as elusive as ever. Joel Clark reports on the success of recent back…

Marked to mayhem. Stewart Eisenhart takes a fresh look at the perennially challenging issues of pricing and valuations on the buy side, arguing that these functions have become all the more crucial to fund managers in the wake of the US sub-prime mortgage

Hitting bottom is never pleasant. Credit market participants – buy side and otherwise – are finding that out as the US sub-prime mortgage sector continues its wholly predictable but no less dramatic collapse. Volatility has skyrocketed, liquidity is…

Messing With Physics

I'm a bit of a documentary junkie. My favorite documentary writer and paroducer isn't Ken or Ric Burns, but science historian James Burke. His two series, Connections and The Day That the Universe Changed , presented seemingly unrelated scientific…

Nothing Good Ever Happens in August

I had planned to write about New York City's preparedness for a major storm after a bout of thunderstorms and a tornado left commuters wet, angry and mostly stationary last week. However, that truly pales in comparison to the storm affecting the credit…

Playing in Harmony

Everyone in the industry can all but agree that the days of the single-asset-trading exchange has gone the way of the open-outcry trading pit both have become quaint curiosities in the Internet age.

More lip service to oversight

Readers are no doubt becoming tired of my editorialising of hedge fund regulation in the US, but so long as government officials and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) provide more fodder for the keyboard, I'm not really in a position to resist.

Corporate firefighters – Joel Clark looks at enterprise data management initiatives on the buy side and concludes that firms’ approaches to managing data is more reactive than proactive due to spiralling costs and debilitating time frames.

As buy-side firms trade increasingly complex instruments and new regulations demand stronger evidence of best execution, it seems a natural time to streamline the processes governing the management of data across the organisation. But as Joel Clark…

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