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The Wall Street Journal's front-page, middle-column story today alerted us to a spate of CDO-crisis-inspired Christmas poems. We thought we'd share with you two of the efforts the Journal found and a third we found on our own.

First is Broker Joe, written by Cameron Crise, a currency investor at Fortis, London. This is based on Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham and illustrated with drawings from the book.

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.

A new report found that deficiencies in the SEC's computer system are hampering the watchdog's efforts to thwart insider trading and spot other regulatory violations.

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.

When we read this morning that JPMorgan is opening a hedge fund services office in Luxembourg, we thought, Luxembourg? Isn't that a postage-stamp sized country with a handful of people living in it? (Lacking confidence in our geographic knowledge, we checked wikipedia and found that indeed, Luxembourg is "a small landlocked country in western Europe, bordered by Belgium, France, and Germany. Luxembourg has a population of under half a million people in an area of approximately 2,586 square kilometres (999 sq mi.)" How can a place with less than a half-million people have so many hedge funds that it needs a new hedge fund administrator? We envisioned an exclusive playground for the super-rich being fawned upon by teams of specialized hedge funds.

Year end is often a time for investors to reflect upon their portfolios and determine whether their assets are properly allocated and how they might be rebalanced. Over the years, the Internet's capacity to assist in this important task has grown dramatically and online asset allocation tools have been a boon to many self-directed investors.

In a bid to turn Apple’s iPhone into a business tool, Astaro, a unified threat management solution maker, announced it will now offer iPhone support to VPNs controlled by its Astaro Security Gateway appliance.

Keeping up with all the advances on the trading end also is important, as is the greening of IT, says Gudrun Neumann in a Wall Street & Technology podcast. We expect questions from potential customers along the lines of how green our data centers are.

Yesterday, the SEC released accounting-rule-savvy taxonomies that companies can start using to submit financial statements, such as 10-Ks, to the agency electronically. (You can view the new taxonomies here.) An SEC committee on the future of financial reporting has recommended that the SEC consider mandating the use of XBRL for financial statements for fiscal years ending December 31, 2008 for large, acclerated filers (companies with more than $700 million in market capitalization, which includes the Fortune 500) Therefore, experimenting with the new taxonomies and with converting reports to XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) during the public review period – now through April 2008 -- is a wise step for Wall Street firms. That way, you can begin to see what process and technology changes you'll need to make to file XBRL-formatted statements. About forty U.S. companies have already begun voluntary XBRL reporting.

UK data supplier Markit announced an agreement to acquire Swapswire, an electronic trade confirmation network backed by dealers for processing OTC derivatives. Financial terms were not disclosed. The acquisition is expected to close in early 2008.

UK intelligence network MI5 has contacted 300 chief executives and security experts at leading British financial institutions, warning them that Chinese state organizations may be spying on them.

"Quants can wear pants to work now," says Martin Harris, product manager at Platform Computing, citing this as one of the benefits of the Symphony 4 grid computing solution his company announced today. Before, he explains, quants at many firms had to wear shorts because they had so many CPUs under their desk that all ran hot.

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