After many years of seeing various flavours of chat in Single Dealer Platforms, most of which are “borrowed” from the normal social chat world, are we now seeing Bloomberg move the goal post and offer a FX Chat application with some punch – the punch in the form of meeting Citi’s monitoring and compliance guidelines around price negotiation.

The only downside to this is that Bloomberg have recently been stung with the who big brother issue around its platform (see previous posting).  It’s also curious to read:

“JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs are a few of the banks that are exploring alternatives to Instant Bloomberg”  Read more...

It’s interesting to read the various snippets of Clojure bank usage that are on the web.  Based on a quick Google, there Deutsche, UBS (blogged about previously) and Citi as a minimum.  The general pattern appears to be that within a bank, a particular area manages to persuade management to accept the “new” language into the fold. Pithering About provides some reasons for Clojure usage on a middle office project.

What is even more interesting in the Clojure world is Datomic. InfoQ has a few articles on Datomic which provide a good introduction to this new distributed database:  Read more...

Curious if anyone has experience of leveraging Service Landscape.  I see SunGuard as a product company are using it, but I’m more interesting is bespoke development usage.  It’s also interesting to see the large US banks, are not members of BIAN

The Economist has an article this month on Global Transaction Banking.  Satvinder Singh, the head of Deutsche Bank’s trust and securities services business summaries the article quite well in his quote:

“Transaction banking is in the middle of a decade of love,”

Further, you can begin to gauge the reason for the interest in the “boring” world of transaction banking, when put in the context of the investment banking and trading world (the previous cool world before it blew up):

Total revenues in this business are probably worth about $200 billion a year, not much less than for investment banking and trading, though far more fragmented  Read more...

The new trade reporting rules will require FINRA members to report executions or cancellations of trades in National Market System and over-the-counter stocks in no more than 10 seconds.

NY Times has an article around the usage of Boomberg terminal data to provide the Bloomberg New division with a competitive edge over the competition.  In all honesty, its not really surprising, especially given the BBG terminal is in every bank, central banks, rival news organizations, Congress and even the Vatican, coupled with the fact that BBG Chat is historically one of the main communication channels for the last n years.

On less frequent occasions, reporters also monitored chats between those subscribers and customer service representatives

The above obviously leads to the next question, how many of the non-customer service representative chats are monitored……..  Read more...

“Return of the Borg: How Twitter Rebuilt Google’s Secret Weapon” on Wired provides an overview of how Google is moving from Borg to Omega, and Twitter on the Mesos road.  Mesos provides isolation of tasks via the Linux container which has gained traction for obvious reasons.

Watching the 2011 GAFS Omega John Wilkes video and reading the articles linked above, one can’t help thinking that DataSynapse and Platform did well to sell to TIBCO and IBM over the last few years, as in many ways, there products are dead today.  Let’s hope the banks, who historically have had the typical desk silo’d compute cluster calculating risk etc (paying licensing fees to DataSyanpse/Platform) are looking at the advances that Twitter and Google are making in resourcing sharing.  Read more...

Worth a read. Dev/Prod Parity is one topic that I see firms always trying to break, with little understanding of the impact of their decisions

I read the story of the black team in some book a long time ago.  My view is that engineers should fear the testing team, and thus provide further emphasis on the important to BDD/TDD and such in the development cycle.  All too often the QA/Testing team in an organisation is disconnected from the engineering team, with the net effect that engineering becomes sloppy about what they throw over the “wall”.

Interesting read over on Traders Magazine around how Morgan Stanley has upgraded its equities infrastructure – Morgan Stanley Cuts Microseconds from Trading Systems.  I’m curious what specifically is meant by “real-time learning algorithms” within their new smart router.

Also, who were the “enterprise infrastructure specialists”?  I also guessing Solarflare, co-lo, possibly exegy market data, and RoCE at a min

Continuing on from the previous posting.  If one decided to annotate the PlantUML flows with max latency data one could then possibly consider leveraging Application Tap for Solarflare from a cucumber test  perspective to capture the hop latency, and validate the flows via the data capture database.  Anyone tried such a thing?

If you find yourself with a Maven Android project which builds fine from mvn command line but gives errors in eclipse the problem may be this:

After a Maven / Update Project, your Eclipse build compliance is updated to what is found in the pom. Without need for “maven-compiler-plugin”, it uses the oldest level.

In my case, Eclipse wasn’t happy with @Override annotations. This was because it was updating to Java compliance to 1.5 which doesn’t support annotations. The problem was more confusing because it didn’t give the correct error. (It said that my methods were not overriding anything – removing them then gave the error that I needed to override two methods.)  Read more...

Every now and again I come across a team that is at sea with agile.  These teams have decided to throw out the concept of business requirements and anything else that is deemed old world, and moved to an agile backlog that fails to capture the business requirements in any shape or form   The backlog is effectively orthogonality to any sensible good practice Scrum backlog.  Business Analysis Times captures this quite nicely with the following quote:

Story is the smallest valuable business requirement that follows the INVEST attributes  Read more...

Writing distributed applications is complex.  Testing distributed application is as complex.  Throw in a distributed applications that spans a LAN/WAN with latency implications, and the software engineering/testing complexities become quite painful to model.

Cucumber in my view is nice from the perspective that is allows the tests to be written in pain text, and in a business DSL.  Sometime ago whilst writing a distributed application, and trying to code the cucumber tests, I realised that I could benefit from the sequence diagrams (PlantUML) that I had draw to allow me to visualise the message flow between the various interested parties (nodes) in my Proof of Concept (PoC).  Read more...

To use maven and eclipse with android projects:

You need the Maven Android Plugin (https://code.google.com/p/maven-android-plugin/) for your maven builds.

And the m2e-android plugin (http://rgladwell.github.io/m2e-android/) for eclipse – otherwise you will get a pom error (“Plugin execution not covered by lifecycle configuration”).

Follow the usual steps to convert a project to maven after m2e-androud plug-in is installed (rt click on project / configure / convert to maven). One thing, when following instructions on the m2e-android plugin page for installing the plugin, you will get multiple hits when searching in the marketplace, the one you want is “Android Configurator for M2E”.  Read more...

To get full system information from the terminal command line:


sudo lshw -html > info.html
gnome-open info.html


If you’ve done something silly and can’t log on with your ubuntu user (in my case it was changing my ~/.pam_environment file to something invalid, then this is worth remembering:

Log on as guest.

Press Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get terminal mode

log on as yourself and make changes to the files.

Press Ctrl-Alt-F7 to exit terminal mode

Fidessa provides a European view of dark pools.  Take aways:

• Reduction in the number of dark venus
• Jump in trading in Q1 2013
• “Dark trading typical occurs when high demand for liquidity yet stocks are seen as hard to trade”
• UBS MTF is the leader
• Liquidnet has good performance quarter-on-quarter

Ernie over on Quantitative Trading offers a view on tools to leverage for back testing HF strategies.  Comments are worth a read.  As mentioned previous on this blog, have a look at Quantopian

To Google and back in 6mths, Rick Lane provide a CTO view of ADL, with a screen shot available here.  Reminds me a bit of StreamBase Studio but for the Algo world based on an algo trader DSL