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AXE ECN coming online April 20, 2007

Posted by James Webster in : finance , add a comment

AXE, ‘the Australian ECN’ now has a basic website outlining some of their plans and the work done so far. It looks like some of my former colleagues from Cards Etc will be partly involved in this venture; they now work at SMARTS who will be providing AXE’s market surveillance system. FIX has also been chosen as the primary interface to AXE; given the ASX have also recently introduced FIX support I think FIX skills will be increasingly in demand in Australia. Check out QuickFix, QuickFIX/J, Marketcetera or CohesiveFT’s FIX virtual appliances to learn and understand more about FIX.

Meanwhile it appears that the ASX is feeling the heat. And AXE will probably avoid the order flow externality…

‘Yanco believes AXE’s initial business, provided by its shareholders, will attract more order flow’.

Linked Out… and who are you anyway?! April 11, 2007

Posted by James Webster in : web , add a comment

I happened to be looking through my LinkedIn account and noticed that they have finally added the ability to remove connections. More on the process here. I don’t know when they added this functionality but I know it has been requested by many people. Funnily enough though, I find that I don’t particularly need to use it… I generally only add people that I have worked with directly or I know enough about to feel comfortable vouching for them should the occasion arise. There are some obvious exceptions such as Stan Relihan, Australia’s most connected LinkedIn user, whom I heard about on this episode of the GDay World podcast.

Visitors to the website backing this blog will also see that I’ve recently signed this blog up to MyBlogLog. If you are member, or become a member, I’d be interested to learn who you are and where you are from; my subscriber numbers although still VERY small do seem to be increasing and I’m simply keen to know a little more about my readers. Hey, maybe some of you aren’t already friends and family! Alternatively drop me a line at jim.mcslim@gmail.com.

More open source software for capital markets

Posted by James Webster in : software, finance , add a comment

I came across Marketcetera a few months ago and they have recently released version 0.3. Marketcetera is an open source (Java) trading platform with client and server components. In addition to a trade entry front-end with a basic blotter it includes a back-end Order Management System compliant with the FIX protocol and a post-trade allocation and reporting system (known as Tradebase) built on Ruby on Rails.

They ship the platform as discrete components or as VMware/Parallels virtual machine images. I’m looking forward to seeing how this platform evolves, particularly whether they will integrate Tradebase more tightly with the OMS and an open-source app server when JRuby 1.0 is finalised. It would be interesting to see if it could be deployed as a Java EAR.