Opinion
The bust of 2008
Making predictions can be either an embarrassing or an enlightening exercise. A recent blog posting that made the Incisive Media rounds last month was a reproduction of a page from a 1900-era edition of the Ladies' Home Journal . In the gloriously dense…
A Market Data Christmas Carol
After returning home from the FISD's holiday party last week, I was woken by the sounds of a horrible wailing and the noise of chains dragging on the ground as the specter of late, great market data manager Jake Marley appeared before me.
No Rest for the Wicked
Given how much end users and data vendors complain about the burgeoning Opra feed of US options data, you might think they would have been grateful for a little respite. Not so, apparently, because when a double-punch hardware and software failure…
Bad Credit? You're Fired!
We've all seen the TV ads: "Bad credit? No credit? No problem! Call 1-800-LOAN-SHARK." ... Or something like that. But could this year's credit crunch have more personal ramifications? Apparently, because at a briefing hosted by sibling Inside Reference…
Redeemable Shares: A Cautionary Tale
Redeemable shares might be a tax-efficient method to distribute capital, but they can be a headache for firms trying to automate corporate actions processing, say Richard Ryndak and Kristina Kulle at Wolters Kluwer Financial Services
A Question of Time
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
Editor's letter: The link between Van Gogh and CDOs
The notion of spending large fortunes, equivalent to the GDP of a small African country, on a Van Gogh painting, is frankly, absurd. The intrinsic value of a Van Gogh - Sunflowers, Irises, The Starry Night or otherwise - is only a few dollars. Paintings…
The year of hedging dangerously
As the calendar winds down, I don't know whether it's more reassuring to look ahead or to look back. This was a rough year. While not entirely an annus horribilis , it was one that traders, IT staffers and industry observers will remember for the lessons…
A fragmented future
The introduction of multi-lateral trading facilities, crossing networks and electronic communication networks are starting to hurt Europe's well-established exchanges. This phenomenon is likely to become somewhat more acute with the recent introduction…
The end of an illusion
It's getting ugly out there. That's hardly surprising news, but still arguably shocking. The Great Credit Crunch of 2007 has now officially expanded beyond the first wave of casualties - hedge funds over-exposed to shadily structured mortgage-backed…
Thanksgiving and Turkeys
Thanksgiving, the quintessential American holiday, stems from the first harvest gathered by British pilgrim settlers after being taught how to hunt and grow native crops in the New World by Native Americans. As the story goes, having survived their first…
Achtung, Baby!
Retired Formula 1 racing champ Michael Schumacher returned to a Ferrari for testing duties last week, and promptly put his younger rivals in the shade. However, Schumi is the exception to the rule: in the market data industry, older inevitably means…
No Time for Downtime (or Sub-Prime)
Having spent the last week complaining to anyone who would listen about missing luggage and a six-hour stopover in Heathrow Airport on my way back to the US, the glitch that disrupted trading and data distribution from the London Stock Exchange last week…
Specialization Takes Command
Electronic trading is getting more difficult. There are just too many new technologies and strategies to choose from, with algorithms everywhere-hundreds of them-at every stage of the investment and trading process. The number of venues has also exploded…
The Lion City Roars
The big news in Singapore last week wasn’t our prestigious Asia-Pacific Financial Information Summit, or even the influx of foreign cash (and resulting linen shortage) as I raced around the city trying to replace my luggage (which apparently decided to…
At Your Service
In-house use of SOA-based technology combined with sophisticated vendor-supplied business services for data management is on the rise, says Dale Richards, CEO of LakeFront Data Ventures
It's Raining Shoes
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
End of Days?
It is November and the end is not in sight. Even though the European Union has been talking about Mifid for some time now, the financial news media and industry experts have instead focused on projects such as Boat, Turquoise and Submarine, and the…
Taking the random route
Traditional ways of measuring investment skill range from the straightforward (looking at the portfolio’s performance relative to the rest of the market over the last one, five and 10 years) to the quant-driven, through to the full machinery of…
Editor’s Letter: Concentrating on the little things
Most of you are no-doubt aware that the IRB 2007 Rugby World Cup has just finished. This is somewhat fortuitous as it affords me the opportunity to indulge my journalistic passion of sports commentary/analysis, the area of journalism on which I cut my…
Asia Data: Prepping for Take-off, or Flying High?
By the time you read this, I—along with a few of my industry colleagues—will be making the long, long flight to Singapore for Inside Market Data’s Asia-Pacific Financial Information Summit, to gauge how much the market has evolved over the past 12 months.
Mapping Market and Reference Data
Whenever I return from New York to London-for example, for our European Financial Information Summit-I realize there's a certain something that I miss about the old country. Maybe it's the rolling countryside, cream teas and postal strikes. Maybe it's…