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Where is the economy headed? Some "experts" say the economy is ready to rebound, after a short contraction. Others think that the economy is just at the beginning of a long and painful recession. However, the truth may be hidden in data that tracks housing starts, according to University of San Francisco business professor Jon Fisher, who previously founded and sold his online authentication company Bharosa to Oracle. Fisher contends the unemployment rate may be headed to 9 percent.

Mark Palmer, President and COO of StreamBase Systems, wrote a blog, "CEP Myths: Mature or Not?",responding to my story on complex event processing (CEP).

The rates trading group at Mitsubishi UFJ Securities, part of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (the largest financial institution in the world in total assets), is putting new technology behind its approach to relative value pricing and dissemination of market data. The group, which was formed in March 2006 and now employs 50 people, is installing a real-time tick database and low-latency price distribution technology.

Now that the SEC has mandated that all large publically held companies file their financial reports in XBRL format, the push is on to implement the necessary technology, codes and processes. However, some are asking: "Just what is XBRL?" As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, what is a video -- a collection of moving pictures -- worth? Well, check out this simple, sometimes witty and informative video primer on the SEC's XBRL mandate from Just Systems:

Adam Honore, senior analyst at Aite Group, has just completed a worthwhile report on complex event processing (which I loosely define as technology that can perform analytics on streams of extremely fast-moving data) on Wall Street. After conducting interviews with captial markets technologists, vendors, standards organizations and data providers, Honore has come to several conclusions, among them:

In the aftermath of the SocGen scandal, a new study has found that 75% of investment firms expect another $100 million rogue trading loss to be uncovered at a large financial institution within the next 12 months.

Java’s popularity – according to IDC, more than $11 billion, or 20% of worldwide server spend, was devoted to Java servers in 2005 and analysts estimate that number is growing 15-20% annually – is sweeping the Street, at least according to anecdotal evidence. “There are four areas in which we’ve succeeded in the last 18 months: derivatives trading, risk analysis, hedge funds and foreign exchange,” reports Ram Appalaraju, vice president of marketing at Azul Systems, maker of a Java acceleration appliance used by many large Wall Street firms. “The reason they prefer Java is the cost of development in Java is a lot cheaper than any other programming environment.”

Traders, institutional investors, research analysts – really, who doesn’t want to be able to see the latest news related to companies in which they’ve invested in or might want to invest? The challenge is being able to sift through the oceans of data available via news services, national and local publications, email newsletters, websites, blogs and social media to see the most relevant news the instant it happens, and be able to tell at a glance whether it's time to buy, sell or hold. A growing group of vendors, including veterans FirstRain and Monitor110 and newcomer SkyGrid would like to help you meet this challenge.

One of India's first surveys on security across the country's financial institutions has found that 30% of banks reported to have been victims of identity theft during the last year.

Sybase this morning announced a shared data service intended to enable all parties who deal with market data – traders, quantitative analysts, portfolio managers, risk managers, compliance officers and others – to work from the same page.

Instant messaging is now widely used in both personal and professional settings. Convenience is the great appeal of instant messaging – it allows people to multitask and carry on multiple conversations simultaneously. Aside from chatting with friends, work colleagues are communicating with each other and businesspeople are making deals – sometimes in different parts of the world – without even saying a word. It has become a common customer service communication channel in a variety of industries. From the customer’s perspective, it is a pressure‐free way to get answers to simple questions.

With more people accessing the Internet via hand-held devices, website developers are being challenged to create online environments that are compatible with a wide range of hardware, from cell phones to widescreen monitors. A recent Business Week technology article highlights the problems this may cause for companies like Google. The search engine giant and other firms that generate revenue from ads must address the fact that there is less ad inventory available on the small screens of hand-held devices.

Bruce Kasman, chief economist at JPMorgan, offered a mostly upbeat forecast for the U.S. economy at the SIFMA Operations Conference this morning in Phoenix.

First Kasman noted the intense interest in the economy lately among people of all walks of life. "This is the first time in my professional life that my children have been interested in what I do for a living," he says. People in professional and social settings have been asking him exactly what's going to happen to housing prices, oil prices and such. Kasman says he's begun telling people who ask what he does for a living that he's a science fiction writer. "This [economy] is, in many respects, unchartered territory," he says.

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