Most Read
- Merrill Lynch Speeds Up Application Development
- Buy Side Seeks Independent Valuation Providers for OTC Derivatives After Credit Crisis
- Getting That Single Version of the Truth on Wall Street
- SR Labs Unveils Low Latency OMS with Market Data
- Is Wall Street Ready for the iPhone?
- The OMS Dilemma: Speed vs. Intelligence
- REG NMS Cheat Sheet
- How the NYSE Achieves Low Latency
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SkyGrid Aggregates, Filters News for the Street
May 15, 2008 @ 05:14 PM | By Penny Crosman
Traders, institutional investors, research analysts – really, who doesn’t want to be able to see the latest news related to companies in which they’ve invested in or might want to invest? The challenge is being able to sift through the oceans of data available via news services, national and local publications, email newsletters, websites, blogs and social media to see the most relevant news the instant it happens, and be able to tell at a glance whether it's time to buy, sell or hold. A growing group of vendors, including veterans FirstRain and Monitor110 and newcomer SkyGrid would like to help you meet this challenge.
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Sybase Launches Shared Data Platform For Trade Data Analytics
May 12, 2008 @ 12:45 PM | By Penny Crosman
Sybase this morning announced a shared data service intended to enable all parties who deal with market data – traders, quantitative analysts, portfolio managers, risk managers, compliance officers and others – to work from the same page.
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U.S. Economy Will Escape Black Hole, JPMorgan's Economic Guru Predicts
May 05, 2008 @ 02:45 PM | By Penny Crosman
Bruce Kasman, chief economist at JPMorgan, offered a mostly upbeat forecast for the U.S. economy at the SIFMA Operations Conference this morning in Phoenix.
First Kasman noted the intense interest in the economy lately among people of all walks of life. "This is the first time in my professional life that my children have been interested in what I do for a living," he says. People in professional and social settings have been asking him exactly what's going to happen to housing prices, oil prices and such. Kasman says he's begun telling people who ask what he does for a living that he's a science fiction writer. "This [economy] is, in many respects, unchartered territory," he says.
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Want Your IT to Look Like Wachovia's? Call Tony Bishop
April 29, 2008 @ 12:48 PM | By Penny Crosman
We checked in yesterday with former Wachovia IT wunderkind Tony Bishop, who led a three year IT re-architecture effort at the firm (you can read about some of his work here). Last fall, Bishop, then a Wachovia senior vice president, took 15 of his staff and left to start his own consulting firm, called Adaptivity.
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A CEP Toolkit Just for Quant Researchers
April 25, 2008 @ 12:40 PM | By Penny Crosman
Intrigued by Vhayu’s announcement of a complex event processing tool geared toward quant researchers, yesterday I looked at this software. It gives quants a means to look for patterns, test ideas and strategies and run what-if scenarios against massive volumes of real-time and historical tick data. It combines some of the features of mathematical algorithmic modeling tools (such as Numerix and Algorithmics) with a fast historical and real-time tick database (a la Vhayu, Kx) with a front-end complex event processing graphical user interface (in the vein of Progress Apama, Streambase or Coral8).
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Virtual Storage and Memory Appliance Combo the Latest Approach to Low Latency
April 22, 2008 @ 11:57 AM | By Penny Crosman
For those on board the advancing trend on Wall Street to virtualize data centers and computing in general, the announcement from Violin and FalconStor this week, that they are offering a virtual storage server bundled with a fast memory appliance, should be interesting. The companies say that for $300 per gigabtye, their storage servers and memory units can stream data at speeds of two gigabytes per second and beyond, accelerating applications 10 to 50 times, while providing the benefits of virtualized storage.
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Wealth Management Trend: Socially Conscious Investing
April 18, 2008 @ 05:05 PM | By Penny Crosman
In the midst of this quarter's write-downs, layoffs and earnings disappointments, wealth management clearly remains a bright, profitable star on Wall Street -- in Merrill Lynch, for instance, wealth management was most strongly profitable unit this quarter and financial advisors have been promised they will be spared from the upcoming layoffs. In an interesting trend, more wealth management dollars are moving into socially aware investing. According to the Social Investment Forum, socially responsible investing assets in the U.S surged 18% from 2005 to 2007, outpacing broader managed assets. Although this research focused on institutional investors, retail investors are following the same pattern, at least according to Bill Crager, president of Envestnet. He should know; his firm's platform for financial advisors, which is used by 400 broker/dealers, beta tested a socially aware investment vehicle with a handful of small investment firms and attracted $300 million in six months.
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Baby Boomers Prefer Paper Statements and Prospectuses
April 17, 2008 @ 11:48 AM | By Penny Crosman
Aite Group recently asked a group of 505 U.S. baby boomers (251 pre-retirees and 254 recently retired) how they like to receive brokerage financial statements and prospectuses and to what extent they would like these to be paperless. Surprisingly, they're not as willing to forego paper as one might expect in these carbon-footprint-conscious times.
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Morgan Stanley Stands Up At Salesforce Revival
April 16, 2008 @ 03:24 PM | By Penny Crosman
Salesforce.com's Tour de Force event this morning was the closest I've ever come to attending a spiritual revival like the ones on TV. There was loud pop music, a charismatic and telegenic leader (CEO Marc Benioff) with a strong and clear if narrow-minded message (which is: utility or cloud computing is the future path for all business applications, preferably hosted on Salesforce.com's servers and software platform), dazzled audience members obediently yet enthusiastically nodding and clapping, and devoted followers summoned up on stage to share their conversion stories.
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Network Accelerator Makes Ethernet Networks Infiniband-Like
April 11, 2008 @ 05:47 PM | By Penny Crosman
If yours is like many Wall Street firms, you'd like to upgrade the one-gigabit Ethernet networks in your data centers to speed up applications, but you're not sure you want to make the leap to an exotic alternative like Infiniband or Fibre Channel. Startup company Teak Technologies offers a radically different idea: replace your end-of-row network switches with a layer of small, local switches that fit directly into racks or blades and, according to Teak, can accelerate an Ethernet network, save money and simplify network management.
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More Remedial Derivatives Technology Emerges
April 08, 2008 @ 10:06 AM | By Penny Crosman
You know markets are suffering when the latest new features vendors tout for their products have to do with liquidation pricing. This morning, SuperDerivatives announced it will provide the liquidation price (or ’exit price’) of all derivatives held within clients’ portfolios. Under the terms of FAS 157, firms are required to define the exit price of all instruments to calculate fair market value or "…the price that would be received to sell an asset or paid to transfer a liability."
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The Technology Challenges Ahead for the JPMorgan/Bear Stearns Merger
April 07, 2008 @ 11:17 AM | By Penny Crosman
Now that JPMorgan has announced that Peter Cherasia, head of global technology and operations at Bear Stearns, will stay on to manage technology, operations and real estate worldwide for JPMorgan's investment bank, he and the other surviving IT managers have a job ahead of them to merge the technology and operations of the two behemoth firms.
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Buy Side Still Laissez-Faire About Derivatives Processing
April 03, 2008 @ 10:23 AM | By Penny Crosman
La plus ca change, la plus c'est la meme chose -- when I mix my eighth-grade-level French with a report the Aite Group released this morning on buy-side OTC derivatives processing, this is what I come up with. As we reported last summer, sell-side firms (with a major push from the Fed) are working hard to automate derivatives processing; but buy-side firms are not.
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Small Flood of New Data Latency Monitors
April 02, 2008 @ 01:40 PM | By Penny Crosman
Over the last month and a half, a slew of vendors have introduced trade data latency monitoring tools, to help exchanges, brokerage houses and buy-side firms find, detect and eliminate the causes of trade data delays.
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Broadridge Rolls Out Workflow for Brokerage Operations
April 01, 2008 @ 09:49 AM | By Penny Crosman
Broadridge last night unveiled the first four of a set of 16 new retail brokerage operations applications designed to automatically handle most operations tasks and route only the discrepancies to operations staff, giving them the tools to quickly research and resolve them. The four initial Ascendis applications, all based on Microsoft ASP.net and BizTalk, automate credit risk administration, corporate actions, balancing and reconciliation and dividends distribution.
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Mobile Apps Are Gaining Respect, Flexibility
March 26, 2008 @ 11:36 AM | By Penny Crosman
Mobile applications and the people in charge of them are gaining more Street cred, according to Todd Christy, chief technology officer at Pyxis Mobile, a provider of wireless applications for the financial industry that counts Blackstone Group, Deutsche Asset Management and OppenheimerFunds among its customers. "Mobility is becoming a first class citizen in corporate America," he says. "We're seeing more chief wireless officers on Wall Street -- at least a half dozen firms have appointed someone to be a mobility leader." A high-profile case in point is Joseph Ferra, Fidelity's chief wireless officer, but several others have that responsibility if not the title itself, Christy says. This reflects an overall increase in demand for application access on the fly, he says.
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Mobile Apps Are Gaining Respect, Flexibility
March 26, 2008 @ 11:36 AM | By Penny Crosman
Mobile applications and the people in charge of them are gaining more Street cred, according to Todd Christy, chief technology officer at Pyxis Mobile, a provider of wireless applications for the financial industry that counts Blackstone Group, Deutsche Asset Management and OppenheimerFunds among its customers. "Mobility is becoming a first class citizen in corporate America," he says. "We're seeing more chief wireless officers on Wall Street -- at least a half dozen firms have appointed someone to be a mobility leader." A high-profile case in point is Joseph Ferra, Fidelity's chief wireless officer, but several others have that responsibility if not the title itself, Christy says. This reflects an overall increase in demand for application access on the fly, he says.
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Poor CDO Pricing Brought Bear Stearns Down
March 19, 2008 @ 02:09 PM | By Penny Crosman
What was the one fatal blow that caused Bear Stearns' suddden demise? Its inability to properly price collateralized debt obligations, according to a report issued by Financial Insights today.
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Could Technology Have Saved Bear Stearns?
March 18, 2008 @ 09:54 AM | By Penny Crosman
Although a full autopsy has yet to be performed on Bear Stearns, reason and common sense suggest that state-of-the art technology might have helped the firm circumvent some of its troubles. Here are a few examples.
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The Principal Saves Costs By Printing on Demand
March 17, 2008 @ 12:54 PM | By Penny Crosman
The Principal Financial Group, a provider of retirement and investment services, life and health insurance and banking with $311.1 billion in assets under management, has turned to print on demand software to streamline and reduce costs in generating and printing 401(k) statements and marketing collateral.
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Column-Based Databases Making A Wall Street Comeback
March 11, 2008 @ 06:41 PM | By Penny Crosman
The last time I met with Sybase, it was back when the big three database vendors were Informix, Oracle and Sybase — remember the 90s? This week, Gavin Quinn, FSI business development manager at Sybase, says the company is seeing a resurgence of interest in its high-speed, column-based databases among hedge funds and financial institutions.
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Doesn't Operations Deserve Some Respect?
March 06, 2008 @ 09:53 AM | By Penny Crosman
In news accounts about Societe Generale's recent trading fiasco, there were mentions of how the operations department was called "the mine" and all Jerome Kerviel wanted was to get out of there and become a trader. The International Herald Tribune reported that in 2006, a man working in Societe Generale's back office operations killed himself on a suburban train. This made me wonder -- is it time for a change in the way operations is viewed? Maybe the people responsible for settling billions of dollars worth of trades shouldn't be abused or treated like peons.
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Markit, Six Investment Banks To Launch Derivatives Pricing Platform
February 21, 2008 @ 10:30 AM | By Penny Crosman
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.)
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Wachovia Improves Its Forex App Response Time 33%
February 14, 2008 @ 02:52 PM | By Penny Crosman
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.
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What's Holding SOA Back on Wall Street? Missing SLAs
February 11, 2008 @ 04:44 PM | By Penny Crosman
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.
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Software Lets Old Apps Run Faster Across Windows Clusters
February 07, 2008 @ 04:39 PM | By Penny Crosman
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.
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Short, Automated Prospectuses To Lower Printing and Postage Costs
February 06, 2008 @ 02:50 PM | By Penny Crosman
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.
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Capital Markets Firms to Spend $41.8 Billion on IT in 2008, Aite Says
February 05, 2008 @ 03:03 PM | By Penny Crosman
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.)
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The Case for Low-Latency File Virtualization
February 04, 2008 @ 11:56 AM | By Penny Crosman
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.
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Wall Street Firms Weather Massive Internet Outage
January 31, 2008 @ 03:49 PM | By Penny Crosman
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.
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130/30 Fund Managers Face Stiff Competition, Many Need Infrastructure Upgrades
January 30, 2008 @ 01:48 PM | By Penny Crosman
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 and sell them to another buyer, with the obligation to buy the shares back at some point in time and return them to the lender. It's a bet that a stock's value will drop, enabling you to buy it back at a cheaper price, while having already pocketed the profit from the original sale at the higher price.)
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How Intel Plans to Save $1 Billion on Its Data Centers
January 23, 2008 @ 03:47 PM | By Penny Crosman
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 plans to achieve nominal cost savings of $1 billion over the course of eight years.
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New Xignite Platform Helps Developers Combine Web Services into Applications
January 16, 2008 @ 10:43 AM | By Penny Crosman
For all their benefits (including reusability and flexibility), one downside of services-oriented architecture is the painstaking work of knitting together reams of web services every time you want to build a new application. Xignite yesterday introduced for its customers a simple platform for mashing or “splicing” web services together, called Splice Studio.
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Vhayu Extends Low Latency Trading Platform To Options, Futures
January 07, 2008 @ 01:28 PM | By Penny Crosman
"As the need for low latency and the ability to accommodate increasing message volumes migrates to other asset classes beyond equities, how do you deal with that?" asks Sang Lee, managing partner of Aite Group, in explaining the significance of Vhayu's announcement today that it's adding new data feed handlers to its Velocity streaming tick processing software.
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Wall Street Firms to Spend $38.2 Billion on IT in 2009, Says Celent
January 02, 2008 @ 11:50 AM | By Penny Crosman
Are Wall Street firms going to significantly increase IT spending in the coming year, as a Wall Street & Technology survey conducted last fall indicated, or will the subprime-related losses force those budgets to be slashed? A new report from Celent stakes a conservative middle ground -- it predicts IT spending for North American securities and investment firms in 2008 and 2009 will grow 4% over 2006 and 2007 levels.
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Subprime Crisis Inspires Christmas Poems
December 24, 2007 @ 08:50 AM | By Penny Crosman
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.
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Remote Desktops Coming to Wall Street in 2008
December 18, 2007 @ 04:53 PM | By Penny Crosman
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.
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What is JPMorgan Doing in Luxembourg?
December 13, 2007 @ 02:55 PM | By Penny Crosman
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.
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SEC Rolls Out Taxonomies That Bring XBRL Reporting Closer to Reality
December 06, 2007 @ 06:06 PM | By Penny Crosman
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.
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Platform Computing Lets Quants, Developers Quickly Put Apps On A Grid
December 03, 2007 @ 12:35 PM | By Penny Crosman
"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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Fully Equipped NYC Offices to Be Offered to Startup Hedge Funds
November 27, 2007 @ 09:54 AM | By Penny Crosman
For startup hedge funds and existing hedge funds that would like to have an office in New York City, Eze Castle Integration announced today it's going to start offering "managed suites" at 529 Fifth Avenue and 44th Street (near Grand Central Station) early next year. The company will provide office space, computers loaded with basic office software, market data feeds, Blackberry services, a telecom infrastructure, conference rooms, a receptionist, a 24x7 help desk, a shared data center, disaster recovery via data replication to Eze Castle's Boston data center and even trial-level versions of software from Capital IQ, MarketStream and others.
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New Model Attempts to Price CDO Options
November 26, 2007 @ 06:54 PM | By Penny Crosman
In the aftermath of the CDO (collateralized debt obligation) crisis, for firms that are ready to dive into securitized credit products again, a new pricing model came out today for valuing exotic credit products such as options on tranches and forward starting CDOs (a forward starting CDO is a single tranche CDO with a specified premium starting at a specified future time).
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Mutual Fund Shouts Out to Its Peeps in Generations X and Y
November 21, 2007 @ 03:35 PM | By Penny Crosman
James C. Perkins is a chameleon. For video segments he's produced for YouTube, Perkins, the founder, CEO and portfolio manager of Thrasher Funds, dons white sunglasses and delivers news tidbits in a hip-hop-and-MTV-influenced staccato style. For an interview with an editor at a conservative trade magazine, he speaks soberly and articulately, using longer words, lengthy and grammatically correct sentences and quickly bringing up a past job as equity analyst at Morgan Stanley.
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Iraq Stock Exchange To Begin Electronic Trading Early Next Year
November 19, 2007 @ 10:46 AM | By Penny Crosman
Amidst some modestly hopeful signs that Iraqis' quality of life is improving (civillian deaths are down, portions of infrastructure have been restored) and that we're planting the seeds of capitalism in Iraq, the executive director of the Iraq Stock Exchange, Taha Ahmed Abdul-Salam, said today that the exchange will start electronic trading early next year. It will also be open five days a week instead of the current three days.
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StreamBase Rolls Out Reuters-Centric Complex Event Processing
November 15, 2007 @ 10:16 AM | By Penny Crosman
StreamBase is announcing today that it's built a Reuters Market Data System-centric edition of its StreamBase Studio complex event processing software. StreamBase Studio itself is both an Eclipse-based graphical development environment and a CEP runtime engine that connects to all the major data feeds and can analyze those data streams in real time. Developers at about 50 Wall Street firms already use StreamBase Studio to build applications that rely on market data streams, such as automated trading, best execution and market data analytics.
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To Survive the Next Market Crisis, Be Like A Cockroach, Says Morgan Stanley Trader-Turned-Author
November 15, 2007 @ 09:46 AM | By Penny Crosman
Richard Bookstaber, author of the book Demon of Our Own Design, offered some unique advice last night to financial firms that want to survive future crises (like the current CDO fiasco): Be more like cockroaches. Not in the sense of living in drainpipes and scurrying out at night to scare unsuspecting apartment and office-dwellers, as New York City cockroaches do, but in a survival-of-the-simplest ideal. While many "super designed" insects in certain jungles that developed specialized adaptions for only one type of flower or seed pod are now history, the homely cockroach lives on and on.
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IBM Upgrades Direct, Low-Latency Delivery of Exchange Data
November 14, 2007 @ 12:04 PM | By Penny Crosman
In their ongoing quest to reduce data latency in the delivery of market data to algorithmic trading programs, Wall Street firms are starting to take data feeds directly from the exchanges, cutting out middlemen like Reuters, Thomson and Bloomberg. IBM's recently-released WebSphere Front Office for Financial Markets 2.0 is one of the few products (Wombat offers another) that can accommodate this. "Customers have told us they're interested in having a platform that can handle data that isn't necessarily tied to a data provider, says Larry Baldauf, director of financial services strategy for IBM's software group. "We can connect to different exchanges and data sources and distribute the data to applications."
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EzeCastle Follows Its Hedge Fund Clients Across the Pond
November 12, 2007 @ 01:20 PM | By Penny Crosman
In a sign of the rapid globalization of hedge funds, EzeCastle Integration, a provider of outsourced IT services and consulting for more than 450 hedge funds, announced today that it has set up a London operation. "Many of our clients are looking for one provider who can provide consistent service, policies and procedures in all the territories they're located, so they can easily do business across geographies," says Bob Guilbert, managing director. "It's natural for companies that are international to want to consolidate their IT best practices under one roof."
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Intel's Newest Transistors Are 20% Faster, Use 30% Less Energy
November 12, 2007 @ 10:47 AM | By Penny Crosman
Intel this morning introduced a series of dual-core and quad-core server processors that run faster and consume less energy than previous versions. The new Intel Xeon 5400 server chipset can achieve front side bus speeds up to 1600MHz yet consumes only 80 watts of power.
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Wealth Management Software Upgrade Helps Coconut Grove Compete in the Big Leagues
November 09, 2007 @ 04:54 PM | By Penny Crosman
To combine big-city investment management services with small-town personal service to its affluent clients, Coconut Grove Bank, Miami, announced this week that it has deployed Sungard's WealthStation and Overlay platforms. WealthStation lets investment advisers provide financial planning and investment products through one system, and Overlay provides access to well-known money managers at large institutions. Together, they "help an organization like ours compete with the Citibanks of the world, with a response time that's much quicker than you find in the large organizations," says Barry Givner, executive vice president and senior trust officer for Coconut Grove Bank's Trust and Wealth Management Department.
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Most Financial Institutions Will Be Green By 2012, Gartner Says
November 07, 2007 @ 04:45 PM | By Penny Crosman
In a research note released today, Richard J. De Lotto, principal analyst, banking industry advisory services at Gartner, declared that financial firms will step up their focus on green IT through 2012. "Environmental issues will rise up on political, media, enterprise, investor and consumer agendas through 2012," he stated in the note. "The financial services industries will not escape this profound change in stakeholder focus, and their IT departments will bear the brunt of the impact.
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Carnegie Mellon, General Motors Roll Out Best Practices Model for Buying Software
November 07, 2007 @ 02:43 PM | By Penny Crosman
Although they don't like to be considered "CMMI zealots," most major Wall Street firms use CMMI methods for software development and require outsourcers to do the same. Today, Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute, with help from top IT executives at General Motors, the Department of Defense and the Government Accountability Office, rolled out an extension to CMMI, called CMMI for Acquisition, that provides a framework, a standard and a common language for buying (rather than developing) software.
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Financial Execs Preview Next-Generation Mobile Technology
November 05, 2007 @ 03:17 PM | By Penny Crosman
Whether or not to deploy mobile applications is no longer a valid question for the 214 executives attending today’s Financial Mobility Summit in Boston. These execs, from firms such as MFS, Evergreen Investments, American Funds, Eaton Vance and Alliance Bernstein, are all old hands at delivering applications via Blackberry to at least one group of constituents, be they portfolio managers, wholesalers or institutional investment managers.
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NorthStar Helps Firms Pump Out Proposals to Wealthy Clients
November 01, 2007 @ 05:01 PM | By Penny Crosman
Good but busy times lie ahead for the wealth management industry – it should grow 30% annually over the next few years according to a PriceWaterhouseCoopers report – and the increasing workload is driving wealth and asset managers to streamline their tasks. One time-consuming and difficult chore is preparing investment proposals, says Bob Skea, chief operating officer of Northstar. "The primary reason it's hard is that the work is manual – they're using PowerPoint, they have to find all the client's fundamental information, they have to collect risk profile data, they need to combine all that with an asset allocation modeling tool, which is often in a different system," he says. "Information about different products — fixed income, SMAs, mutual funds and so forth — all come from different sources." And once all the right information is gathered and a proposal is drafted, it may be noncompliant, because there's no record of how the proposal was generated and where the information came from.
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Colombia Stock Exchange Builds A Scalable SOA Platform
November 01, 2007 @ 11:15 AM | By Penny Crosman
Although its climate is hotter, its industries more diverse and its market smaller, in some respects the Colombia Stock Exchange looks like any U.S. or European exchange. It grapples with the same technology issues -- such as how to get data latency below a few milliseconds and how to build an IT infrastructure that can easily scale and withstand market volatility and surges - that plague any exchange or firm with a large trading floor.
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Data Centers Are Understaffed, Over Budget and Breaking Their SLAs, Survey Finds
October 30, 2007 @ 03:20 PM | By Penny Crosman
Cutting costs and consolidating/virtualizing servers are top priorities for data center managers, who are struggling mightily to meet service level agreements and staff their data centers properly, according to a study Symantec released today. The company polled 800 data center managers at very large, Global 2000 companies who manage an average of 14 data centers each. (Although it's probably better known as a security vendor, Symantec's acquisitions of Altiris and Veritas have turned it into a data center infrastructure provider). Among these data center operators, about one-fifth of whom work for financial companies, data center expenses are growing rapidly – 69% said their expenses were growing at least five percent a year and 11% reported growth of 20 percent or more per year. Although these respondents also reported budget increases – an average of 7.1% -- the 3% inflation rate means these budgets are not keeping pace. These managers also stated that IT spends more than two-thirds of its budget in the data center.
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Vhayu Offers Real-Time and Historical Order Book Analysis
October 29, 2007 @ 10:49 AM | By Penny Crosman
As order books get bigger – the Tabb Group recently estimated that in just equities and options, the volume of market data messages across the global exchanges will soar from under four billion messages per day in 2006 to nearly 130 billion per day by 2010, as the number and variety of trading venues increases, as trades become smaller (e.g. 100 shares per order), as cancels and replacements accelerate, and as Reg NMS and MiFID make it necessary for firms to prove best execution, the need for an engine that can process and store that order book data efficiently becomes greater.
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