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

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:

Forex market liquidity will vary throughout each trading day as global financial centers open and close in their respective time zones

Armed with this information, we can now turn to FCM360 “Foreign Exchange Hosting, Colocation & Connectivity” article that provide a good overview of the various FX venues and Colo’s.

Looking at the FCM360 network diagram, ignoring the fact that its FCM360, the choice of location for an FX pricing engine of a sell-side company is usually going to be either New York or London, or both.  The “both” are often chosen to leverage “Follow the sun” from a liquidity perspective.  What this means is that since Asia and European open before the US, during the course of a trading data, the ideal location of the Pricing Engine would be in London to reduce latency and sit closer to the liquidity centers.  As the liquidity moves through the trading day, it maybe advantageous to swing the Pricing Engine to New York to gain a latency advantage.  Obviously the swinging of a Pricing Engine from one locations to another needs to be well managed and leverage an appropriate software architecture, otherwise there could be costly implications.

Risk management could also take advantage of “Follow the Sun”, since the market data and hence risk calculations that leverage this data and the trade portfolio’s if located close to the source of the changing data, can themselves reduce the data movement over a LAN/WAN, and thereby speed up the overall calculation time.

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.

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

• Cache what’s important
• Monitoring
• Infrastructure failure

Of particular interest is the Pricer with its sophisticated level of customisation and rapid ability to explore and modify leg structures. Clearly BAML is exploiting a reusable container/framework, as evidenced by the Munis screenshot, showing a consistent look and feel across the platform – exactly what users are looking for in a multi-asset platform, and with obvious cost efficiencies for the firm. Nice work; congratulations to those involved.

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).

There is now full support for cross-origin connections, so that in most cases you don’t have to use the same domain name for the web server and the Lightstreamer server.

The new JS library has now full support for out-of-browser applications, resulting in the possibility of leveraging Lightstreamer inside new JavaScript-based platforms, such as Node.js and PhoneGap. For example, you can now use the Lightstreamer JS API inside your Node.js application to get real-time data from Lightstreamer Server with few lines of code

Many other features are available as part of the new JS client library, including a new logging and error management facility as well as new ready-made widgets (a new status indicator and new data grids).

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

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

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.

Lab49 will explore how IT costs can be controlled and identify which vendor relationships are necessary to support strategic IT investment plans. Additionally, Lab49 will describe the potential risk factors involved when introducing a complex trading product and the true cost of trading as firms aim to grow market share. Several best practice approaches will also be presented to help firms recognize new market opportunities.

While firms need to be cautious about their IT investment priorities, they also need to be wary of the affects IT cost reduction may have on trading system performance. Lab49 have worked with global investment banks, buy-side firms and exchanges to examine the impact of regulations, emerging technologies and the changing competitive landscape. Every type of financial firm needs to establish an accurate IT forecast, not only to improve business performance, but to accelerate growth and quickly react to market changes.

WHEN:

Wednesday, April 25, 2012 at 14:15pm GMT

WHERE:

TradeTech London 2012

Excel Centre, One Western Gateway,

Royal Victoria Dock, London E16 1XL

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?

• Make an impact in 5 days or less – a colleague I recently had a beer with reminded me that he recalls this “rule” 14 or so years ago when he and I first worked together. Interestingly, he now spreads the word on this ‘rule”
• If there’s a white board in the room, use it. So many people don’t get the benefit of white boards and hence real-time visualisation of the problem. Many people are scared to stand up and draw in a meeting, maybe they are worried about the audience. Get over it is my view. The white board is a key tool in understanding problems, and designing software solutions to solve business problems.

So lets turn to the 2nd rule above, and how this is impacted by business travel. When I travel for business to help client on the road to understanding and developing new business solutions, I find I always use white boards extensively when in meetings, and while brain storming with colleagues. One of the problems I find with travel is that I don’t have a white board in my hotel room/corporate apartment

Clients usually have a selection of whiteboard technology, from the basic whiteboard on the wall – remember to carry your own pens, as this is often the next problem you run into. The next step up from the basic whiteboard is the meeting rooms with a screen board – i.e. a whiteboard with printer attached. These screen boards aren’t bad, but I always find the print out provided isn’t clear enough, and every time I’ve do a print, its always black and white (do they actually do colour printers?), but I’ve used colours to annotate the data on the board, or there is information lost. Which leads to the iPhone collection of whiteboard photo’s being stored

Which leads us to the smart boards, or interactive boards, which from a quick Google, look to be the latest technology in this space. Check out this video of the touch gestures. I can only hope we see smart board technology in the near future in the financial services meetings rooms that I spend most of my life in, and not just a piece of technology for the board room.

I’m sure Smart boards would save me some of the time I waste in erasing, re-drawing, moving data from one part of the board to another due to running out of space. I’ve never used a smart board, but if I could draw a rectangle, and ideally the smart board would “improve” the straightness of the lines, allow me to shrink and expand the rectangle via gestures, add text etc, and then drop the image to OmniGraffle or similar, I’d be sold on them.

Remember when Complex Event Processing (CEP) products were the buzz a number of years back? Streambase, Coral8, Aleri to name but a few, all offering similar features, and pitching to the same financial (and non) clients. Over the last few years we’ve seen the various CEP products either merge, get acquired, or disappear. Today, StreamBase is I believe the only remaining independent CEP product company, with Microsoft, Oracle, Sybase to name but a few of the other multi product company who now have a CEP product in the family.

Now lets look at the Web Messaging space. There are 5+ web messaging product companies today. In a similar way to the CEP product companies, these web messaging comnpanies are almost all one product companies, offering “similar” product features, and going after the same financial (and non) clients. Should we expect the Web Messaging companies to follow the same path as the original CEP companies?

Now jump to Informatica acquisition of 29West Inc – slight old news. Informatica bought a best of breed Ultra-Low Latency Messaging (ULLM) technology company, and rightly so. So why didn’t Informatica buy Kaazing to complete the messaging solution. The press release (although old news again) praises Kaazing technology, so why didn’t Informatica just buy Kaazing and roll the WebSocket Gateway into the ULLM product to provide an end to end offering?

We’re thrilled that Informatica has chosen Kaazing as the full-duplex web communications backbone for its Ultra Messaging products

The conditions are ripe to take electronic trading to a new level. Lab49 and Commodities Now seeks to uncover whihc features and functionalities of online energy trading platforms are important to the users which remain unmet by the current indutry offerings. The Energy e-Trading Survey will examine the capabilities gaps in the areas of pre-trade and analytics, execution and post-trade, and will also provide key insights into how the users’ needs and expectations vary based on the characteristics of the users’ profiles. Take the survey.

NYSE Euronext plans to launch a new electronic retail derivatives market in the first quarter of 2013 with products based on commodities, currency pairs, equities and indexes

Tradeo’s suite of trading tools includes market analytics, pricing and charting information, quotes, financial calendars, news and the ability to monitor trends and set limits. Members use social media functionality to share views (trending, news feeds, befriending, chatting, liking, emailing/private messaging, commenting, sharing, polls etc) and users can get immediate feedback from their ‘friends’ on the trades and orders they execute.

The core of our technology is a back-testing engine to simulate trades based on historical results. Built into Quantopian is a web application to develop algorithms, to configure and run historical back tests, and to calculate fundamental risk measures for the algorithm during the back test period.