Editors letter
Can Emerging Markets Save Wall Street?
Someone suggested to me this week that the city of New York might tear down the statue of a bull that stands on Broadway, not far from Wall Street, to more accurately reflect the current state of the financial markets. In return, I suggested that adding…
Like a Bull to the Slaughter
Whether you fall into the camp that says governments should intervene to protect orderly markets by supporting companies such as AIG that threaten to collapse, or the group that says market forces should be allowed to run their course even if that means…
Darwin in Action
After several quarters of whistling past the graveyard, Wall Street and the global markets have succumbed to all the toxic debt that the market has been generating for the past few years. What does this mean from an IT perspective? Except for the…
Dear Clara and Joe...
Last week, Clara Furse and Joe Ratterman, chief executives of the London Stock Exchange and BATS Trading, which is gearing up to launch an alternative venue in Europe trading LSE-listed stocks, exchanged words via open letters on the state of competition…
Weaving a Market Fabric
The European markets will soon see the number of active multilateral trading facilities (MTFs) more than double and will come a step closer to creating a new European market structure, which industry consultant Bob Giffords dubs "a market fabric." With…
Lessons Learned
This week marks the seventh anniversary of the terrorist attacks that took place on Sept. 11, 2001. In the wake of those tense days, it's easy to forget that nearly everyone was expecting the next shoe to drop. There was talk of dirty bombs, increased…
A Shining September
EDITOR'S LETTER
Editor's Letter - Coming full circle
Something more than a little quirky emerged from the European and New York art scenes just over 90 years ago: Dadaism. Without going into too much detail about the movement's raison d'être , it bears remembering what the Dadaists aimed to achieve and why…
Foreign foibles
Before travelling to an exotic location most people go through a long check-list of precautions to protect themselves from perceived dangers, ranging from sickness to theft. They will pack malaria pills, water-purification tablets, seasickness medicine,…
Pension tension
Conventional wisdom has it that bruising market conditions bring out the more risk-averse tendencies of pension fund and long-only managers as they buckle down and wait for more favourable trading environments to return. By Stewart Eisenhart
The Building BRICs of a Global Data Strategy
Sometimes as I sit writing this column late at night, I enjoy-or rather, endure-a swig or two of guarana soda from Brazil to stave off exhaustion and give me a little boost in the wee hours. And high-caffeine soda isn't the only Brazilian import that the…
Desktops: The Next Generation
It's always impressive to see how popular science fiction programs set the design bar when it comes to technology. One of the documentaries on the subject, How William Shatner Changed the World , examines the impact that the Star Trek writers and prop…
The Most Valuable Part of Your Data Business?
We often hear how market data is the third-highest cost base for today's financial firms, behind only real estate and staff salaries. But do we focus on that third cost at the expense of the second-the people that make it all work?
Are You Ready to Be Spun Off?
The saying goes that life is what happens when you are making other plans. Sell-side financial technologists are certainly experiencing life to the fullest these days. Over the last several years the technology trend was to tear down silos and roll out…
Setting the Record Straight
In the final scene of Billy Wilder's classic movie Some Like it Hot , when Jack Lemmon discards his wig and reveals to ageing playboy Joe E. Brown-who has been unwittingly wooing Lemmon-that he's a man disguised as a woman, Brown merely shrugs and says, …
The Dog Days of Summer
Does anything good happen in August? As I write this, the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing are under threat from the Turkistan Islamic Party. At the same moment, Russian tanks are rolling into the capital of the breakaway Georgian province of Southern…
The Case for Consolidated Market Feeds
In this age of low-latency direct feeds, consolidated market feeds such as the CTS, CQS and Opra are viewed more as necessary evils than sexy must-haves. Yet not only do these feeds remain basic essentials for firms to gain a consolidated view of an…
Who's Number Three?
It seems SunGard CEO Cris Conde is looking to upend the troika of the major standalone sell-side order management system (OMS) providers with SunGard's announcement late last week that it intends to purchase competitor GL Trade.
Editor's letter - Are you going soft?
The bicycle industry has changed a lot in recent years. Back in the mid-eighties, before frame manufacturers started dabbling with aluminium and carbon fibre, frames were made almost exclusively of steel, a material that required precision and experience…
Good Works, Great Fun
EDITOR'S LETTER
Closing the Gap
At the risk of repeating a trite cliché, India really is a land of contrasts. According to a recent report from the Indian National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector, four of the world's ten wealthiest billionaires are Indian citizens,…
Today's SEC: Helping you un-break the law
As the US economy stares down the abyss of a de facto recession, in no small part due to lack of meaningful regulatory oversight of dubious financial practices, it appears the Securities and Exchange Commission's leadership has no intention of altering…