Content posted in January 2008
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Wall Street Firms Weather Massive Internet Outage
Although damaged cables under the Mediterranean Sea shut down or severely slowed down internet service today across India, Egypt and the Middle East, Wall Street firms with IT staff and outsourcing projects in India seem to have been been well served by their network backups.
Bird Flu Pandemic: Will Telecommuting Work on Wall Street?
While most Wall Street firms plan to rely on telecommuting in the case of a pandemic, new in-depth results of a financial industry drill show that few employees actually did telecommute at all....
130/30 Fund Managers Face Stiff Competition, Many Need Infrastructure Upgrades
In the past few weeks, State Street, Legg Mason, TD Asset Management, Bear Stearns and other asset management firms have introduced new 130/30 funds; all told, about 140 of these funds exist today. But Colin Bugler, director of prime brokerage for RBC Capital Markets, says these asset managers will face intense competition and will need to ramp up their technology infrastructure, particularly those who are new to the business of shorting stock. (To short a stock is to borrow shares from a broker
ISE Teams with Eurex to Develop New Options Trading System, Replacing OMX by 2011
The International Securities Exchange (ISE) and Eurex, the derivatives marketplace owned by Deutsche Borse, will jointly develop a new options trading system for the ISE. The ISE previously said it would stay on the OMX trading platform despite its merger with Eurex
Fidessa LatentZero and Pipeline Partner on Leak-Proof Integration
Fidessa LatentZero's partnership with Pipeline Trading Systems LLC will give buy-side traders the ability to match up large block trading opportunities in Pipeline ATS with orders on their blotter without risking information leakage.
Aite Group's Bailey Heads to Knight Capital Group
Brad Bailey, senior analyst at Aite Group, is moving to Knight Capital Group as a director in the business corporate development area.
Societe Generale: Could it Have Prevented $7.2 billion fraud?
Jerome Kerviel, the Societe Generale trader who allegedly carried out a $7.2 billion fraud, confessed to police that he hid his activities from his superiors, and claimed both he and other employees had been carrying out risky trades since 2005. So how could Soc Gen have prevented the fraud?
First Coverage Adds Quote Feeds to Help Buy-Side Assess Sell Side Trade Ideas
Toronto-based First Coverage is adding 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.
Turquoise Taps Apama and Detica to Build Market Surveillance System
Turquoise, the high-profile multilateral trading system (MTF) in Europe founded by nine investment banks to compete with the London Stock Exchange and other traditional exchanges, has hired Progress Software and Detica to develop a market surveillance system.
Online Options Brokers Should Target Women and Generation Y, Survey Shows
Chicago-based OptionsHouse 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.
Updating Record Volumes
With volatility back in the stock market, institutional investors are routing orders with a vengeance and boosting the volumes at some of the newer equity trading venues. Here's an update on the volume records that occurred this week.
Financial Crossing Releases Liability Manager 3.0
Liability Manager 3.0 features a customizable front end that can be configured for self-service on a Web portal.
TraceSecurity Launches Risk Manager Solution
Risk Manager enables companies to protect confidential data from physical and electronic threats, as well as demonstrate a verifiable and repeatable methodology for security
Guardian Analytics Launches Easy Fraud Prevention Solution
FraudMAP does not require fraud rules development or algorithm training, according to Guardian Analytics.
NSX Names Saro Jahani as SVP of IT
Former Townsend Analytics executive Saro Jahani is named senior vice president of IT at the National Stock Exchange (NSX)
6 Reasons to Adopt an Enterprise Architecture
A Cutter Associates study of enterprise architectures in buy-side asset-management firms cites six reasons why these firms should adopt a framework and structure for enterprise architecture.
How Did the Societe Generale Fraud Happen?
France's second biggest bank, Societe Generale, is reeling under the discovery of a $7.14 fraud committed by Jerome Kerviel, a trader working on the futures desk at the bank's headquarters in Paris. So how did such massive fraud happen and lie undetected for so long?
Little Orphan Annie's Decoder Ring Comes to the Brokerage Industry
Interactive Brokers launches a new "low-tech" security login card. It reminds us of Little Orphan Annie's Decoder Ring from A Christmas Story.
Rogue Trader Rocks SocGen
Societe Generale announced today that a rogue trader had undertaken "exceptional fraud" resulting in losses of $7.14 billion.
ITG Releases Triton in Asia Pac
Investment Technology Group (ITG) has launched its Triton execution management system (EMS) for the Asia Pacific region. Buy side traders will have access to more then 30,000 equities across the Asia Pacific markets.
Rosenblatt Securities
Rosenblatt Securities is a New York-based agency brokerage that was founded by Richard (Dick) Rosenblatt in 1979 as an NYSE floor brokerage. As trading has become more electronic, Rosenblatt has evolved into a boutique that helps its buy-side clients achieve best execution while navigating the new market structure.
Interdealer Broker to Roll out Hybrid System Across Firm
Fixed-income inderdealer broker BGC Partners plans to offer both voice brokering and electronic trading to all its customers.
How Intel Plans to Save $1 Billion on Its Data Centers
Who doesn't want to make their data centers more cost-effective? When we asked sell-side firms recently where in IT they would most increase spending in 2008, 82.4 percent said "data center infrastructure" -- this ranked far above any other item on our list. That's why we thought we share with you some highlights of a report Intel released this week that details how it avoided spending $30 million on its data centers in 2007 and how it pla
Brokerage Employee Pleads Guilty to Insider Trading Conspiracy
As one of Wall Street's most far-reaching cases of insider trading continues to unravel, a former employee of Hoboken, NJ-based brokerage firm Assent has pleaded guilty to conspiracy, after admitting he accepted bribes to conceal illegal trades based on inside information provided by a former employee at UBS...
Columbus Avenue Chooses SuperDerivatives As Independent Platform for Valuing Credit Derivatives
Hedge fund administrator Columbus Avenue Consulting, LLC, selected the Super Derivatives Credit derivatives platform, SD-CD, to price its hedge fund clients' portfolios of credit default swaps.
The decision points to a growing demand for independent valuation sources, as hedge fund portfolios are hedging or placing bets on the fixed-income market using credit default swaps or indexes.
Turquoise Update
Despite recent delays to its planned launch, Project Turquoise, the multilateral Pan European trading facility established by a consortium of banks, is on its way to a 2008 launch with its CEO and CTO in place and two new partners.
BGC Partners
BGC Partners, a fixed-income, inter-dealer broker, spent the end of the year gearing up for two important technology upgrades.
Market Tumult Lifts Volume at Liquidnet and Pipeline
The jittery behavior of institutional investors and hedge funds could be good for alternative trading systems (ATSs) judging from the recent highs in dark pools. Two of the dark pools, Liquidnet and Pipeline, announced record high volumes last week.
Trade Reporting, Surveillance Key To Compliance
With increased regulatory focus on protecting securities market participants, trade reporting and trade surveillance are key to providing transparency, efficiency and oversight for today's trading environment.
Financial Firms Spent $285 Million on Corporate Actions Technology in 2007
An Aite Group study found that spending on corporate actions technology has been rising dramatically since 2004.
Global Trading Technology Spend Reached $45.8 billion in 2007
The U.S. accounts for around 35% of the total global spend on trading and related technology and services.
6 Promising Hedge Fund Traders
Emerging hedge funds can be risky, but these six hedge fund traders has proven his ability to generate strong returns.
All Trading Desks Are Not Equal
With all of the resources spent on giving traders an edge, asset managers are benchmarking their trading capabilities to learn how they stack up.
Asset Managers Start Benchmarking IT Projects Against the Competition
As the technology that asset managers use in all parts of the business matures, firms increasingly are questioning how their technology strategy compares to that of the competition.
Application Lifecycle Management Speeds Product Delivery at Raymond James Financial
Application lifecycle management (ALM) tools are being adopted at Raymond James Financial to improve time to market time to market and reduce IT inefficiencies.
The Term Web 2.0 Is Fading Away
Web 2.0 is rapidly becoming the Internet as we know it. Soon, people will refer to Web 2.0 applications as, simply, the Web.
Data Center Engineering Needs To Consider Consumption
The modern data center must be crafted with regard to resource consumption so financial firms can obtain enough power to efficiently manage data, analyze the markets and route orders.
Buy Side Firms Start Taking Enterprise Architectures Live
AIG, TIAA-CREF, Freddie Mac and other asset management firms have begun not only building formal enterprise architectures, but benchmarking them against others' as well.
Forex Lowers Latency By Upgrading Its Messaging Platform
Foreign exchange brokerage Forex Capital Markets had to reduce data latency to less than one second. Its answer lay in adopting multicasting and deploying a new messaging solution from 29West.
Lehman, NYSE, CME, Forex Capital Pursue New Latency Killers
Data compression, network redesigns and distributed memory are some of the new approaches that organizations such as Lehman Brothers, the New York Stock Exchange, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Forex Capital Markets are exploring to eliminating data latency.
Citisoft Hires Christopher Russo as Managing Director
Russo will develop business opportunities, key client relationships and performing executive level project management duties across the front, middle and back-office within the buy-side technology and operations space.
Axelrod Named CEO at Cogency
Jeffrey Axelrod, the founding CTO of the funds of hedge funds software provider, has been named CEO
Electronic Trading Drives High-Performance Infrastructure Spend
The evolution of the modern trading-desk infrastructure is very much a function of the confluence of market factors that are driving transaction levels to extremes.
Client Reporting Is Key, But Still Lacking Resources
Client reporting is critical to customer satisfaction and retention. But automation and other resources in the area still are lacking.
Enhanced Shared Assessments Program Can Make Audits Speedier
The Collaborative Software Initiative (CSI) recently joined the Shared Assessments Program, automating the questionnaire by providing a web services front-end application for collection and editing shared assessment submissions and an XML schema for validating and accepting those submissions as XML documents.
Progress Releases Smart Order Router Accelerator
Progress Software has released its Progress Apama Smart Order Router (SOR) Accelerator to help traders quickly and effectively create and deploy smart order routing strategies.
Performance Measurement Often Is Manual, Reveals CutterBenchmarking Study
CutterBenchmarking report found that firms varied wildly in their performance measurement capabilities, although there was no relationship between their overall score and either their size or major asset type.
Brokerages Still Fail to Offer Full Web-Based Banking Services
New Corporate Insight report suggests only 40 percent of brokerages can truly be considered a full 'bankerage,' defined as a brokerage that offers traditional banking products, including FDIC-insured savings and checking accounts, with all accounts accessible via a single Web login.
Financial Firms Need to Improve Their Use of Web 2.0 Technologies
A new report by kasina argues that Web 2.0 technologies -- including blogs, wikis and mashups -- could yield powerful advantages and that firms are missing out on great opportunity.
6 Tech Issues Wealth Managers Must Address To Meet Client Expectations
Wealthy clients are considering more-sophisticated strategies for managing their assets and are requiring a great deal more from their providers.
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Exclusive: Inside the GETCO Execution Services Trading Floor
Advanced Trading takes you on an exclusive tour of the New York trading floor of GETCO Execution Services, the solutions arm of GETCO.
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