Trading Tech
Northern exposure
Grant Speirs recently made the northern trek from Cape Town to London to assume the position of group financial director at investment manager M&G, the holding company of his previous firm, Prudential Portfolio Managers. He speaks with Victor Anderson…
Doing what it says on the tin
Given the ongoing challenges facing buy-side firms in their attempts to accurately and transparently value hard-to-price securities, it is no surprise that the industry has witnessed the launch of a number of services designed specifically to address…
Month in Numbers
'The decision to get an automated reconciliation engine was a no-brainer - doing cash and scrip reconciliations is not a value-add. It's hugely important from a risk perspective, but should we be using intelligent staff to do something so menial?'
Case study Perfect partners
Guernsey-based Corazon Capital has been through a number of organisational changes in its twelve-year history, which culminated in the implementation of a new investment management platform developed by Third Financial Software at the end of last year …
The party's over
One of the by-products of the ongoing global financial meltdown is the likely cessation of self-regulation for buy-side institutions.
Fidessa fragmentation index hits the spot
London-based trading platform provider Fidessa group has seen strong demand for its Fidessa Fragmentation Index (FFI) since it was launched in mid-November 2008. The web-based service is free to use and provides a numerical indicator of how much a…
Idiosyncrasies of counterparty risk
Out of all the skeletons now hanging (thankfully) in the 2008 closet - from Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns to Jérôme Kerviel, Samuel Israel III and, of course, Bernard Madoff - one lesson should have been universally learnt: when you're investing money…
Technology spending to drop 5% during 2009
Ongoing challenges impacting financial market participants is likely to drive down technology spending at buy-side firms even though they are being spurred by regulators and investors to enhance their enterprise-wide risk management and transparency…
CEP Tries to Branch Out From Complex Roots
Complex event processing software vendors continued to win business from algorithmic trading operations that require analysis of high- frequency data streams during 2008, but also sought to make their products seem less complex to promote takeup across…
Firms Struggle to Tame Capacity, Latency
Trading firms continued to pursue ever-lower latency in 2008, but continued to face challenges from spiralling data volumes, driven by options data and the arrival of new trading venues in Europe. With no clear solutions emerging to address the dual…
Ionic Completes KTS Migration
UK-based data vendor Ionic Information has completed the migration of former clients of Knowledge Technology Solutions' MarketTerminal product onto Ionic's Alpha terminal data display.
IBM Adds Handlers, Preps Acceleration
IBM has released a series of new feed handlers and is readying others to expand its feed coverage of European and Asian markets.