Trading & Risk Technology

Last week (Jan. 25) at the Harvard Club in New York Aaron Brown, author of Red-Blooded Risk shared some of his thoughts on risk management at a high level by focusing on an aspect of risk management that does not get enough visibility: the risk introduced by systems that are meant to reduce risk. I [...]

Everyone has an idea of what “risk” is, and it isn’t a positive one for most. There’s the president of a New York-based financial planning firm telling The Washington Post that U.S. stocks are too risky. And there’s Friday’s BusinessWeek headline pronouncing corporate bonds as less risky than before. Both reinforce the powerfully negative stigma [...]

Debate across Europe over debt crises, austerity measures, bail-out funds and credit ratings make it easy to forget that the region’s financial institutions are on the same page about stress testing and regulation, as well as data growth and latency. Results of a recent Sybase survey released Tuesday serve as a reminder. Rapid growth of [...]

The ‘trading’ (read gambling in my view ) website InTrade allows everybody and their dog to trade on future events such as who will win the U.S. Republican nomination, who will win best picture at the Oscars, and, interestingly, will S&P rate Greece in default before midnight ET 31 Dec 2012 (see: http://www.intrade.com/v4/markets/contract/?contractId=754058). Looks like [...]

A survey conduced by LowLatency.com (see results at: http://low-latency.com/blog/polls-past-and-present-just-two-clicks-have-your-say/?utm_source=house&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=11_12-01-12) show that only a small percentage of traders and trading strategies require nanosecond latency. In the CEP software world we understand that to shave nansoconds off users are resorting to hardware acceleration – but don’t count CEP out yet as 73% of respondents were in the [...]

Emerging markets and technologies could have a profound impact on investments in 2012, a topic Inside Market Data explored on Monday. The weekly market data publication talked to Sybase CTO Irfan Khan about how the growing importance of Big Data is changing analytics. “Companies are at a crossroads,” Khan said. “While some are looking for [...]

Chalk up a victory for the financial services industry last weekend in its resistance to higher capital requirements under Basel III. Institutions would still have to maintain significant buffers to prevent another round of government bailouts, but they could dip into these high-quality assets when times get tough enough. “During a period of stress, banks [...]

Many long term cost factors are not on the minds of most database application users when running a given relational database management system (RDBMS), according to a Sybase-sponsored study conducted by market intelligence provider IDC. “Calculating the True Cost of RDBMS Ownership and How Sybase ASE Stacks Up: A Guide for SAP Business Suite Users” [...]

Automated trader conducted their annual reader survey, and published the results of their findings. Collated by Bob Giffords, there were some key take-aways that I found interesting. Firstly, we have to remember that subscribing to Automated Trader is quite expensive, and so only people with an interest in automated trading are likely to participate in [...]

Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis by James Rickards (Portfolio, November 10, 2011) James Rickards’ first book, Currency Wars, explains the recent history of legal tender in an easy to understand manner, focusing on currency manipulation, the gold standard and other fiscal models, such as Bretton Woods and the collapse of monetary [...]