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Junk Mail? What About Junk Data?
Just as the bane of a data manager's existence is dealing with ever-increasing volumes of often irrelevant quote data, a journalist's nightmare is dealing with the incessant flow of press releases from PR professionals desperate to share the latest news…
Operating with Bear Bones
It's official. After a quick 10-minute vote by Bear Stearns shareholders, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has himself a new, if slightly battered, prime brokerage business. According to officials, it will operate as wholly owned subsidiary of JPMorgan…
The Welch Way
With the klaxons sounding over the credit crunch, there's a quieter revolution happening in IT. Between the cost cutting and rising demand for faster and more exhaustive risk calculations, major financial firms are being pushed into deploying compute and…
Opening Doors
We hear a lot about trading firms trying to obtain data from emerging markets because they believe they can achieve higher returns from higher-risk, less established markets. But one problem with this is that few markets still regard themselves as …
Exploiting the New Realities
It is interesting what pops into your inbox when you edit a publication called Dealing with Technology . Last week, I received a press release from a Danish firm that had put a genetic switch into tobacco to turn the plant red in the presence of chemical…
A Case of Déjà Vu for Thomson Reuters
Thomson Reuters hit the mainstream news again this week amid fears that the vendor plans to lay off thousands of staff as a cost cutting measure following last month's merger. If we rewind-or perhaps "Fast Forward"-a few years, haven't we seen this…
Never a Dull Moment
Having lived and worked in New York City for the past decade, I have seen first hand how remarkably the city can reinvent itself. From the redevelopment of Times Square and relocation of the historic Fulton Fish Market to the recovery from the scars of 9…
Front Office Grids: Why Bother?
During a panel discussion that took place at the second annual Street#Grid event ( see story , page 1 ), technologists and consultants discussed the challenges of expanding enterprise compute and data grids to the front office. It reminds me of a…
InfoDyne Sale Reflects Need for Speed, Volumes
One of the themes of last week's North American Financial Information Summit was the continuing battle to balance the need for low-latency data with the burden of managing rising data volumes. And if any consensus of sorts was reached, it appeared to be…
Where Has All the Money Gone?
Money certainly hasn't found its way to New York City. According to a recently published report by industry analyst firm Celent, brokerage IT spending in North America from 2008 through 2011 will grow at an anemic rate of 1.3 percent, which is down from…
When Weighing Your Options, Less is More
Data consumers often liken their applications to a baseball catcher's mitt, attempting to catch the high-speed data being pitched at them by US options exchanges. And in the example of options data, just like a pitcher who can keep his pitch count low,…
Congratulations, Mr Glocer, It's a Boy!
... Or is it a girl? Actually, it's a multi-billion-dollar monster. Last year's illicit affair has at last blossomed into marriage, and-after a lengthy gestation-the birth of a new entity and the patter of tiny feet.
Green Is Not Optional
According to a recent report presented to the U.S. Congress, the growth in IT power demand over the next decade will require the construction of 10 full-scale power plants just to meet it. Those numbers are just for IT and do not consider growth in…
The End of the World as We Know It?
This Thursday, April 17, Radio City music hall in New York will reverberate to the sound of change-not next season's Rockettes lineup, but rather the changing of the guard at Thomson and Reuters, which complete their mega-merger this week.
Gliding on the Wind of Change
Having spent three years covering the US markets, last week's inaugural Amsterdam Financial Information Summit helped me better understand some of the differences-and similarities-between how the US and European markets are adapting to change.
The March of the MTFs
It was only a matter of time before the leading ECNs would turn their sights to the European market. Within the next six months, Bats Trading expects its London-based multilateral trading facility (MTF) to be up and running in London ( see story, this…
Liberate the Datacenter
It's time to shake up the organization chart a bit. For the longest time, corporate datacenters have been managed by banks' operations and real estate organizations. This needs to stop-and stop now. Administering a datacenter should be in the hands of…
Going Dutch
This week, the IMD bandwagon rolls into Holland for its inaugural Amsterdam Financial Information Summit, where panels of experts will attempt to hash out (pardon the pun) the key issues affecting the European market data landscape in a one-day program…
Looking for the Bear Necessities
Looking over JPMorgan Chase's proposed acquisition of Bear Stearns, the old saying, "Act in haste and repent in leisure," comes to mind.
If Content Is Still King...
... then why do we keep hearing that it's "commoditized," or that it's "noise"? If it's so valuable, why are market forces and industry initiatives seemingly aiming to make so much of it freely available? And if content is the priority, how come we hear…
Bear Attack
As I sit down to write this week's column, the warning klaxons are sounding up and down Wall Street as Bear Stearns turns to JPMorgan Chase to access emergency liquidity from the U.S. Federal Reserve. Bear CEO Alan Schwartz has already held the …
The Case For Scrutinizing the Scrutinizers
No doubt there were more than a few wry grins-or even cries of jubilation-in the financial markets when New York governor Eliot "Ness" Spitzer resigned last week after being caught spending a fortune on high-priced call girls. The former scourge of Wall…
Pimp My CPU
As the introduction and adoption of grid computing revolutionized the financial services industry, another disruptive technology is just off in the wings waiting to burst onto the scene-massive parallel processing.
Swimming With Sharks and Whales
The upcoming movie 21 tells the true story of a group of MIT students who set out to beat the casinos of Las Vegas at blackjack, using sophisticated card-counting techniques to determine whether a table was "hot" and to gauge the likelihood of winning…