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Cake Financial, the social network investment service that lets investors track and share the performance of their actual brokerage accounts, has launched a Facebook application.

Amidst all of the buzz regarding the progress of NAVA’s Straight Through Processing initiative, advisor education is a topic that has come up quite frequently over the first two days of the 2008 Nava Marketing Conference. Indeed, a panel of distributors commented that one of the most important things annuity providers can do is to provide product education to their advisors. Given the importance of advisor education, it is surprising, then, how few firms use their advisor websites in this capacity.

In the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis and subsequent plummeting in value of mortgage-related derivatives such as CDOs, which in turn has generated a crop of unhappy investors, lawsuits and regulatory concern around improperly sold and priced derivatives, it's no wonder that companies that offer help in determining the value of derivatives contracts are coming out with new products. While many (Numerix, Maplesoft, Quantify) offer pre-built mathematical models for calculating the theoretical value of a derivative now and in the future, Markit, a provider of several derivatives indices, strives to provide actual prices at which certain types of derivatives are currently trading. (Reuters and NYSE Euronext also offer such derivatives valuations.)

Fidelity ranked last year as the top online brokerage in terms of customer satisfaction, according to a new survey carried out by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) and ForeSee Results.

Wachovia's investment bank had a problem: foreign exchange customers were complaining about platform performance issues. "Foreign exchange is not a good place to have performance issues -- not when you like to retain customers," notes Jim Hirschauer, architecture manager and technical expert for the corporate and investment banking technology division of Wachovia.

Dutch banking group ING is closing the online community it launched in the virtual Second Life world last year.

With the aim of boosting security in the financial services industry, ISO, the world's largest developer of international standards, has issued a new biometric standard for financial firms.

The heavily siloed computing model that pervades Wall Street today is not transitioning to "SOA goodness" any time soon for one key reason: lack of service quality, said Hugh Grant, director of global IT research and development at Credit Suisse, at the Web Services/SOA on Wall Street show in New York City today. Funding, security, risk and compliance are additional hurdles to large-scale SOA adoption at investment firms, he said.

With a second trader now in custody in the Soc Gen fraud scandal and rogue trader Jerome Kerviel in jail, a French magazine today published a series of instant messages Kerviel and his broker at Newedge exchanged over the course of several months leading up to their arrest.

Ever since the clock speeds of individual computer chips stopped doubling, those who have wanted to run existing applications faster -- such as algorithmic trading desks -- have had to turn to grid computing or specialized hardware to get that extra processing power. Multicore chips (which put two, four or more computer processors on one chip) and clusters of computers hold out the promise of high-performance computing but can't truly provide it to the typical application. The reason for this, as we've noted before, is that most applications have been written in a single-threaded manner -- they're designed to do one thing at a time. For an application to take advantage of more than one processor, whether on a multicore chip or across clusters of computers, it needs to be rewritten so that it's multi-threaded (in other words, it can perform several tasks at the same time) or optimized in some other way.

Investor communication is in dire need of reform, said Forrester analyst Craig LeClair in a webcast this afternoon on the SEC's proposed short-form prospectus. Most prospectuses are "written by lawyers for other lawyers to digest," he said. "It's an arcane format, it's hard for investors to get what they need out of it." The prospectus for an variable annuity, for example, might be 1,000 pages long and it may not be clear to the investor which product he owns. "The value of the information put in that large book is diminished by its inclusion with non-relevant information," he said.

Several dozen financial industry and technology professionals recently gathered at the Tribeca Grand Hotel in New York, to attend a private advanced screening of "The New Face of Cybercrime," a documentary film by Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Fredric Golding.

Aite Group put out a new, optimistic IT spending report for the capital markets yesterday that, like the Wall Street & Technology IT spending survey that we released in November, predicts an increase in IT spending of just under 10% for 2008, as well as for the ensuing years through 2011. (By contrast, a more conservative Celent report anticipated only a 4% rise in spending this year, to $36.2 billion.)

Christine Lagarde, France's economy minister, said some of Societe Generale's internal controls failed to work, leading to the scandal of the junior trader who "lost" $7 billion.

The best idea in large-scale storage in the past decade has been storage virtualization software, also called storage fabric -- hardware-agnostic middleware that lets IT managers intelligently manage the storage of files and data. In an ideal implementation, storage virtualization saves network, server and storage managers from having to re-provision files and data to new devices when servers and storage devices become full, and reduces disruption and downtime for users who need to access information. Yet the harsh reality is, many storage virtualization solutions that claim to be hardware agnostic are really tied to specific storage products. New to the table as of today is a network switching appliance that aims to virtualize file storage to any type of storage unit, from F5 Networks.

If you ask investment advisors for a list of their most important investment tenets, odds are that they’ll include a statement along the lines of "Maintain a disciplined investment approach." Translation: don’t get spooked by market volatility.

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