We Weren’t in Kansas to Begin With

There was a point on Sunday afternoon, somewhere between the seventh layer of Hell and aisle three at Tesco (two places that, while on paper seem unrelated, are likely to be remarkably similar), where I realized that something profound had changed in my psyche. Mostly it was to do with my shopping basket. Amid the pots of cinnamon sticks and star anise, the fresh lemongrass and coriander─torn, Gordon Ramsay told me, not ground─I was finding myself unreasonably frustrated with the fact that I couldn't find lime leaves anywhere in South Ealing. If only there was a Waitrose nearby, I thought, before idly wondering if my 16-year-old self would punch me in the face if he were here now.

So, either I'm an inordinately profound ass, or I might have to abandon the illusion that I'm still at university. The answer, I suspect, falls somewhere in the middle.

Concept Maturity
It's this element of maturity that's important, and I'm not necessarily talking about buying shallots instead of red onions, because they'll complement the turmeric better. Maturity is a buzz word that's frequently bounded around the business side of the markets and the technology side, and depending on the context, like most things in English, it can mean radically different things. Mature markets in one breath may mean stable, safe and reliable. In another, juxtaposed with dynamic Asian economies, the phrase may represent staid, bloated and difficult apparatus weighing down the natural buoyancy of recovering economies.

In technology, too, it can either mean advanced infrastructure, or be shorthand for legacy. The latter, I find, tends to start cropping up before talks about outsourcing departments start. But in order for elements of maturity to start coalescing in markets, there needs to be a degree of advancement around the basic concepts before that can start to happen.

Take high-frequency trading (HFT) as a prime example. After it really exploded during the past decade, regulators, lawmakers and others all scrambled to understand what it is exactly, what it's doing, who's doing it and why. The results have been mixed, but a more nuanced grasp has emerged through consistent research and investigation of late.

Maturity is a buzz word that's frequently bounded around the business side of the markets and the technology side, and depending on the context, like most things in English, it can mean radically different things.

This can more or less be applied to any other technology concept that's taken the market by force. Big data, cloud computing, field-programmable gate arrays, algorithmic trading, co-location, they've all provoked their own degrees of fear and debate. But as they stay around for longer, people gain insight into how it affects their operation, and they benefit from it.

With big data, for instance, it's not so much about collecting all the data that you possibly can, but knowing what you want to ask the data that delivers results. For cloud, it's not necessarily about putting everything on a managed basis, but changing the way that some operations go about their business to help you reduce costs and increase efficiency. With algorithmic trading, a lot of the intellectual and psychological challenge has been around understanding that while all HFT is algorithmic trading, not all algorithmic trading is HFT.

The natural reaction to these over-hyped developments is to assume that they'll change the very face of everything, ever. More often than not, though, true value comes with time and the maturity of the concept itself, rather than assuming the initial understanding is the correct approach.