Max Bowie: Lights, Camera, Data!

In Trading Places, Eddie Murphy—transformed from beggar to commodities broker at the whim of wealthy siblings—quickly grasps the concept of “buy low, sell high” and explains to his mentors why falling pork belly contracts will continue to drop, as they watch prices tumble on their antiquated screen.

Sure, Murphy’s street hustler character has a certain degree of acumen, but the scene demonstrates that some people have a gut feeling—albeit supported by hard data—that allows them to understand human behavior about money when under pressure. And it’s precisely this talent that start-up Nous.net is hoping to tap into with a new data feed that captures investor “trading” activity from its mobile app trading game and turns this into a feed of sentiment indicators that banks and hedge funds can use to gauge market sentiment and predict price movements.

Security
Now, you wouldn’t want Eddie Murphy’s character—or more commonly in this day and age, a hacker—having access to your trading systems, so security is a big issue.

In Working Girl, Melanie Griffith learns that Sigourney Weaver has stolen her idea for a merger and acqusition (M&A) proposal when she sees it on Weaver’s computer. And with the capital markets experiencing distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and attempted hacks, keeping information safe doesn’t just apply to home computers and credit card details. Hence hardware acceleration provider Solarflare’s new SolarSecure and upcoming SolarLockdown products—designed to protect against malicious intrusion or unwanted message traffic—move the vendor from being a supplier of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) for accelerating data platforms and feed handlers to a provider of network and server security tools. They protect servers carrying everything from client portfolio data to streaming market data, and trading servers from anyone wishing to steal sensitive data or even place bad trades in your name, as villain Bane does in The Dark Knight Rises to bankrupt Batman’s alter-ego, Bruce Wayne.

Chatter
Of course, this isn’t the only way malicious activity can adversely affect investments. In Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Shia LaBeouf wipes millions of dollars off the value of a rival’s investment by starting a rumor with a fake message over his trading terminal.

As the “trickle-down consumerization” movement continues, data may ultimately become just as accessible as downloading and watching a movie.

His ability to spread market-moving chatter in this way depends on terminals with interconnected messaging networks, such as Bloomberg’s Instant Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters’ Eikon Messenger, and Markit’s new Federated Chat initiative, not to mention the AOL and Yahoo instant messaging networks still favored by commodities traders.

But LaBeouf’s actions may get a little harder in the future if Bloomberg moves ahead with changes to the process by which its users can interact with other messaging platforms. On one hand, the moves are seen by some as an attempt to ring-fence the exclusivity of its network and make it harder for users to participate in Markit’s competing initiative, while on the other, it may make it harder for users to engage in—or at least, easier for firms to spot and audit—any nefarious activity, such as price-fixing of benchmark rates.

In the future, this won’t be the domain of only institutional traders. Not only are traders carefully watching the sentiment of retail investors to pre-empt market movements; the retail traders themselves now have a better chance to get in on the act.

Online tools for strictly retail investors are now more sophisticated than those available to Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gekko character in Oliver Stone’s 1987 movie Wall Street, while data services at all levels are gradually being revamped with more focus on search and navigation than on clunky interfaces and hard-to-remember ticker symbols and keyboard shortcuts, to appeal to a new generation of traders who grew up with the internet and expect professional data services to be just as accessible.

As this movement of “trickle-down consumerization” continues, data may ultimately become just as accessible as downloading and watching a movie.