Gaining the Edge

The specifics of their demands don't really matter; the refrain remains the same. Take heart: DWT will help you discover the strategies needed to deliver on both of these demands at our annual London-based DWT 2007 conference and trade show on Thursday, May 3.

We've moved the venue this year to the Hilton Tower Bridge, steps from the London Bridge tube stop on the Northern and Jubilee lines, and a quick hop from the City and Canary Wharf.

We have corralled leading industry thought leaders to discuss how they alleviate the pain points of automating derivatives processing, managing ever-growing enterprise grid computing resources, implementing low-latency execution systems and tackling the evolution of transaction cost analysis (TCA).

Our all-star lineup of speakers includes technologists from Barclays Capital, Bear Stearns, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, FourthCreek Capital Management, Goldman Sachs, Rabo Securities and others. For more details on the event, please visit www.dwt-event.com.

In the meantime, I've been pondering newflow algorithms. The industry's silence tells me that many are working on them. We've seen the major market data vendors launch XML-tagged offerings, but the real fun is in the unstructured text arena.

Almost everyone has subscriptions to Reuters and Dow Jones Newswires, but finding those hidden nuggets of information that might make a difference will be in those sources that can't afford, or don't really care to tag their content: I am referring, of course, to blogs—not the ones written by Xenia the Goddess of Fire about her cat, but those published by executives and technologists. Nary an R&D department exists without at least one blogger on staff.

How will firms harvest analysis from these high-quality blogs and add the data into their trading strategies? Would they manuually add each blog to a white list of sources to check on a regular basis, or will we see investment banks competing with Google and Yahoo to create an automated way to locate and assess the quality of new content? It will be interesting to see the industry hash this out.

On another note, DWT welcomes Wendy Mock, our Hong Kong-based reporter. She has been covering the Asia-Pacific beat for a number of years and we look forward to her stellar coverage of the financial technology industry in the weeks and months to come.

Comments? Send them to me at rob.daly@incisivemedia.com.