Feature

Editor's Letter - Bigging-up the back office

From a buy-side perspective, the front office has traditionally been where all the sexy action takes place. And rightly so. It's the area of the business directly responsible for performance. Come to think of it, the front office is a bit like the engine…

Speculators in the crosshairs

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is considering implementing position limits for buy-side players trading energy products, potentially restricting the number of positions traders can take on futures exchanges. Stewart Eisenhart reports

Dabbling in the dark

Dark pools started to appear as early as a decade ago in the US market, but it has only been over the course of the last two years that they have attracted sufficient liquidity – perhaps as much as 12% of US equity orders and 4% in Europe – to make them…

Adapt or die

Smart order routing is not a new phenomenon for buy- and sell-side organisations, but the tools that let firms route trades according to their own specific criteria have evolved significantly over the last two years. Gone are the days when these…

Algorithmic News Gathers Pace

News providers found new ways to deliver and present their content to users during 2009, notably by broadening and reducing the latency associated with machine-readable news offerings as algorithmic and high-frequency traders increasingly seek to…

Exchanges, ATSs Battle for Share

2009 was a tough year for exchanges worldwide, especially in Europe, where continued fragmentation has resulted in lower market share for most incumbent markets at a time of subdued trading volumes compared to 2008.

Regulators Take Aim at Flash, High-Frequency Trading

Regulators spent much of early 2009 in the spotlight for failing to spot and halt Ponzi schemes like Bernie Madoff's, but shifted the focus in the latter half of the year to practices surrounding algorithmic and high-frequency trading, to the distress of…

Economic Woes Drive Data Caution

The economy continued to overshadow data strategies and decisions in 2009, and even though the markets have shown a swift recovery in some quarters, continued uncertainty about the economic climate is prompting firms to take a cautious approach to…

Latency: Industry Ups Focus on Measurement

The race to zero of eliminating latency from data distribution and processing continued apace in 2009, though firms also became more critical of their ability to accurately measure latency, to assess their status compared to their peers.

Vendors Vie for Share with New Platforms

Though Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg maintained dominant market shares and unveiled major initiatives in 2009, other data providers launched their own projects to broaden their client bases as they vie with rivals for the remainder of the market.

Data Consumers Spend for Technology Edge

Difficult operating conditions prevailed in the aftermath of the financial crisis, but user firms continued to invest in data technologies to give them an edge over rivals during 2009, either in the speed of sourcing and processing data, or in quality of…

Emerging Markets Appeal Lingers, Bucking Global Trends

Despite the recent crisis in Dubai, emerging markets as a whole continued to grow as a combination of commoditization and the global economic crisis forced investors to look further afield for returns on capital.

Safety in numbers

One isn’t just the loneliest number – it can also be the most dangerous. The traditional ‘single-prime’ hedge fund model, severely tested at the close of 2008, is a case in point, as hedge funds move towards multiple prime broker relationships. By…

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