Opinion
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…
Doing more with less in 2008
Traditional investment managers are being assailed on all sides. The market volatility of the past twelve months has only served to emphasise legacy challenges, while bringing with it new obstacles to be met and overcome. With revenues squeezed, managers…
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
Getting Lost and Found with Enterprise Architecture
It is dramatic when IT's slipups fatally wound, but more often, it's just another tale of wasted resources and missed opportunities. How can firms avoid these miscues, do more with less, and handle wholesale change? And yes, business has its faults too…
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…
A New Paradigm for Data Strategies
With capital markets facing a stream of new data that is growing in complexity, density and speed by the day, outsourcing underlying technology is one option for firms designing data strategies that encompass a broad spectrum of requirements. By Sinan…
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
How to Implement the Ultimate Fair Value Program
The basic ambition behind any fair value service should be to provide a fully transparent calculation, writes Telekurs Financial's Lydia Galasean
Compliant derivatives
After 85 years at the heart of Wall Street, Bear Stearns is no more. But even before the highest profile and most celebrated casualty of the credit crunch closed its doors, the inevitable questions about who was next in line were already doing the rounds…
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…
Portfolio Desks On the Block
For the past few months NYSE Euronext has been working with Pragma Financial Systems to provide floor traders on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) access to trading algorithms that will put their orders on par with outside orders ( see story, this issue…
Come Together
I'm not good at dealing with change-at least according to my last performance review-and the only major change I have to deal with is Inside Market Data 's upcoming move to new offices closer to Wall Street next month. So spare a thought for those data…
Bloomberg's All-Star Deal
In the lead-up to last week's annual All-Star baseball game in New York, a row erupted between Red Sox pitcher Jonathan Papelbon and the New York press corps about who was the better closer and should end the game-Papelbon or revered Yankees pitcher…