Wall Street & Technology: Blog

Talk to Walt (Bettinger)

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 11:54:42 -0500

Charles Schwab Corp. named Walter W. Bettinger II as its new CEO, replacing the discount brokerage's founder.

Fidelity Top Online Brokerage for Customer Satisfaction, says Survey

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 15:44:24 -0500

Fidelity ranked last year as the top online brokerage in terms of customer satisfaction, according to a new survey carried out by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) and ForeSee Results.

Soc Gen: Kerviel Messages with Broker Revealed

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 11:54:43 -0500

With a second trader now in custody in the Soc Gen fraud scandal and rogue trader Jerome Kerviel in jail, a French magazine today published a series of instant messages Kerviel and his broker at Newedge exchanged over the course of several months leading up to their arrest.

Software Lets Old Apps Run Faster Across Windows Clusters

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 16:39:04 -0500

Ever since the clock speeds of individual computer chips stopped doubling, those who have wanted to run existing applications faster -- such as algorithmic trading desks -- have had to turn to grid computing or specialized hardware to get that extra processing power. Multicore chips (which put two, four or more computer processors on one chip) and clusters of computers hold out the promise of high-performance computing but can't truly provide it to the typical application. The reason for this, as we've noted before, is that most applications have been written in a single-threaded manner -- they're designed to do one thing at a time. For an application to take advantage of more than one processor, whether on a multicore chip or across clusters of computers, it needs to be rewritten so that it's multi-threaded (in other words, it can perform several tasks at the same time) or optimized in some other way.

First Coverage Adds Quote Feeds to Help Buy-Side Assess Sell Side Trade Ideas

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 14:46:40 -0500

Toronto-based First Coverage is adding real-time quote feeds from global exchanges to its Web-based software, allowing the buy-side to further quantify the value of trading ideas and other research they are getting from the sell-side.

Online Options Brokers Should Target Women and Generation Y, Survey Shows

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 11:30:32 -0500

Are you curious about the characteristics and behavior of online options traders? This week Chicago-based OptionsHouse, an online retail and institutional brokerage house, rolled out the results of its first annual survey and it found that 91 percent of options traders are men and that 57 percent are between the ages of 45 and 54 years of age. They are also educated �76 percent are college graduates, while 32 percent have graduate degrees.

Lime Brokerage Acquires Stake in CBOE Stock Exchange

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 14:03:29 -0500

Lime Brokerage has acquired a minority stake in CBOE Stock Exchange, a subsidiary of the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE). The investment was made on Jan. 3, although financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Vhayu Extends Low Latency Trading Platform To Options, Futures

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 13:28:32 -0500

"As the need for low latency and the ability to accommodate increasing message volumes migrates to other asset classes beyond equities, how do you deal with that?" asks Sang Lee, managing partner of Aite Group, in explaining the significance of Vhayu's announcement today that it's adding new data feed handlers to its Velocity streaming tick processing software.

Global Trading Technology Spend Reached $45.8 billion in 2007

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 16:50:36 -0500

Global spend on trading and related technology and services reached an estimated USD$45.8 billion in 2007, according to a new report from Somerset, UK-based Kimsey Consulting.

Remote Desktops Coming to Wall Street in 2008

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 16:53:38 -0500

Here's a prediction for the coming year: remote desktopping -- in other words, moving desktop CPUs off (or out from under) desks and into racks, data centers and closets -- will hit the Street in force some time in 2008, or maybe 2009. Wachovia has already said they're kitting out the new trading floor in their under-construction Charlotte headquarters with remote desktops (or "back-racked PCs" as they call them), which will open in 2009, and the inventors of the latest generation of remote desktop technology, Teradici, say that 20 Wall Street firms have expressed interest in it.

StreamBase Rolls Out Reuters-Centric Complex Event Processing

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 10:16:06 -0500

StreamBase is announcing today that it's built a Reuters Market Data System-centric edition of its StreamBase Studio complex event processing software. StreamBase Studio itself is both an Eclipse-based graphical development environment and a CEP runtime engine that connects to all the major data feeds and can analyze those data streams in real time. Developers at about 50 Wall Street firms already use StreamBase Studio to build applications that rely on market data streams, such as automated trading, best execution and market data analytics.

IBM Upgrades Direct, Low-Latency Delivery of Exchange Data

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 12:04:00 -0500

In their ongoing quest to reduce data latency in the delivery of market data to algorithmic trading programs, Wall Street firms are starting to take data feeds directly from the exchanges, cutting out middlemen like Reuters, Thomson and Bloomberg. IBM's recently-released WebSphere Front Office for Financial Markets 2.0 is one of the few products (Wombat offers another) that can accommodate this. "Customers have told us they're interested in having a platform that can handle data that isn't necessarily tied to a data provider, says Larry Baldauf, director of financial services strategy for IBM's software group. "We can connect to different exchanges and data sources and distribute the data to applications."

Banks to Consolidate 144A Trading on Nasdaq Platform

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 11:03:14 -0500

A group of investment banks has decided to stop developing their own electronic trading platforms for 144A securities and instead share the single platform launched by the Nasdaq Stock Market. Yesterday the banks announced their intention to form The Portal Alliance, an industry standard facility designed to serve the market for 144A equity securities � referred to as private placements.

Colombia Stock Exchange Builds A Scalable SOA Platform

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 11:15:17 -0500

Although its climate is hotter, its industries more diverse and its market smaller, in some respects the Colombia Stock Exchange looks like any U.S. or European exchange. It grapples with the same technology issues -- such as how to get data latency below a few milliseconds and how to build an IT infrastructure that can easily scale and withstand market volatility and surges - that plague any exchange or firm with a large trading floor.

Vhayu Offers Real-Time and Historical Order Book Analysis

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 10:49:47 -0500

As order books get bigger � the Tabb Group recently estimated that in just equities and options, the volume of market data messages across the global exchanges will soar from under four billion messages per day in 2006 to nearly 130 billion per day by 2010, as the number and variety of trading venues increases, as trades become smaller (e.g. 100 shares per order), as cancels and replacements accelerate, and as Reg NMS and MiFID make it necessary for firms to prove best execution, the need for an engine that can process and store that order book data efficiently becomes greater.