Overview available here.  The PDF is available is you are interested in the full read.  After a view brief read, my initial comments would be that some of the diagram are interesting, but its a little to high level for me.

The debate appears to be still raging on if/when the Java final keyword should be be used   It reminds me of the OS debate of the 90′s.  What’s your view?

Wall Street & Technologies article “Financial Firms Can’t Ignore iPad and Android Tablet Apps” provides insight into how the financial vertical is leverage the uptake of the iPad.  I wonder if the financial sector will embrace Windows 8 Metro in the same way? Likewise, will all new Single Bank/Dealer Platforms be released first on the iPad before the desktop browser multi-window version is offered?

Finextra has an interesting article titled “Outdated core systems a drag on growth for European banks”.  Essentially this means that the European banks need to spend and improve their core system to improve gains in the Single Dealer/Bank Platform space.

providing a unified customer experience across channels is an issue for about half of European banks, impacting their ability to effectively cross-sell

First, lets clear up what “Follow the Sun” trading means.

The spot FX market is unique to any other market in the world, as trading is available 24-hours a day. Somewhere around the world, a financial center is open for business, and banks and other institutions exchange currencies, every hour of the day and night with generally only minor gaps on the weekend. Essentially foreign exchange markets follow the sun around the world, giving traders the flexibility of determining their trading day.

A quick read on Dummies “Liquidity and the Foreign Exchange Market” provides a view on liquidity.  Of particular importance:  Read more...

e-Forex’s article “Utilizing cloud computing architectures for improved control over risk and FX back-office operations” offers a few views on cloud usage by the Foreign Exchange space.  The main just of the article being the value of compute power to calculate FX risk in almost real-time, especially with the increase in HFT:

HFT in FX is a rapidly changing market where strategies need to be adapted to changing market conditions, and hosted solutions provide a suitable alternative

Fund administrators appear to be one area that should be focused on cloud migration, and leveraging the compute resources to understand the risk of the portfolio, and presumably run “what-if” scenarios.  Read more...

Wall St & Technology offers an interesting read on Rosenblatt Securities proprietary platform that analysis and visualizes big data.  Of interest:

• Tableau for visualization
• GPU powered server to process tick and quotes from US exchanges
• EC2 for storage
• Proprietary database

Interesting read on Tradeweb’s pre-trade credit checking mechanism into the swaps trading process.

A welcome read on data centre OS’s, after a time laps of anything new from Microsoft Research around Midori and Singularity.

Cool Vendor Report 2012 Cites Weswit, with its Lightstreamer Product, as Innovative, Impactful and Intriguing in the Area of Application and Integration Platforms

InfoQ’s Architecting for Failure at the Guardian.co.uk is worth a watch/read. Some take aways:

• Cache what’s important
• Monitoring
• Infrastructure failure

I had a ZX Spectrum, followed by a Sinclair QL. A lot has changed in 30 years And what about the Horace games

We were gratified to see BAML’s new Mercury FX Options trading platform recognised as the Best FX Options Platform at the annual Profit and Loss Digital FX awards in London on Wednesday. This is an extremely sophisticated, feature rich platform representing in many ways a state of the art custom SDP. Features such as the lean workspace design, clear use of real estate and focus on trading tools that can be seen in the screenshot at http://corp.bankofamerica.com/business/ci/mercury (click on FX Options).  Read more...

Interesting read over on Financial News on UBS’s Quod Studio – gestures to create algo’s.

Reading the blurb on Lightstreamer 5.0, one can only assume Lightstreamer has seen the JavaScript light I can only hope that now the other web streaming product companies will follow the JavaScript road.

The new JavaScript API, version 6, uses AMD (Asynchronous Module Definition) to offer full modularization of the library. This means that it is now possible to include only the objects that are actually used by your application, rather than having to include the full library. For this purpose, a generator tool is available for on-the-fly creation of custom versions of the JS library. The resulting lib is a single file and you don’t need to include anymore a set of different JS and HTML resources (as in previous versions of Lightstreamer).  Read more...

Anyone got the list?

Update: So a kind colleague provided me a few of the winners:

• Editors Choice: Credit Suisse Plus
• Best FX Options Platform: Bank of America Merrill Lynch Mercury
• Product of the Year: Credit Suisse Plus

Stumbled across this from the Akka mailing list, looks very interesting:

http://www.khronos.org/opencl/

As expected there are both Java and Scala bindings provided by the following projects:

http://code.google.com/p/javacl/

http://code.google.com/p/scalacl/

I look forward to playing with it as GPU enabled grid computing is looking increasingly promising

Lab49 will explore how to minimize IT costs

London, New York– April 17, 2012 — Lab49  (www.lab49.com), a strategy, design and technology consulting firm that builds advanced solutions for the financial services industry, will be speaking on a panel at TradeTech London 2012 on Wednesday, April 25.  Lab49 together with GLG Partners, Quant Hedge, Invesco Perpetual and Legal and General Investment Management will be discussing how to achieve optimal trading system performance while minimizing IT costs.  Read more...

Yesterday we saw the announcement that Software AG had acquired my-Channels. Should we expect Sybase to buy one of the remaining web streaming companies to complement its CEP acquisitions some years ago (Aleri)?

Read all about it here. Definitely a correlation to my early posting this month

This is a major step in implementing Software AG’s strategy for the in-memory management of Big Data. my-Channels technology supports modern messaging standards such MQTT and HTML5/webSockets.

So how long before the remaining web streaming companies get acquired? Or disappear?