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More Australian ECN news July 23, 2007

Posted by James Webster in : finance , add a comment

ASIC (the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, the Australian equivalent of the FSA or SEC) has released a consultation paper (via Exchange News) requesting input from stakeholders regarding the entry of AXE ECN and Liquidnet into the Australian market as venues for trading ASX-listed equities. I was not previously aware that Liquidnet were expanding into Australia. I hope the readers of this document have read Harris and provide their feedback from an academically informed point of view in addition to their practical experience.

Appendix 1 of the consultation paper provides an interesting list of the current Australian Market License holders. A quick look at a few of the websites shows that Microsoft .Net plays a growing role in providing the technology behind markets; both Yieldbroker (fixed income) and Mercari (interbank interest rates and derivatives) reference .Net as a requirement for their client platform at least.

Hadoop on EC2 July 20, 2007

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

A while ago I suggested that Hadoop and Amazon EC2 could be used to construct an open source derivatives risk pricing grid platform as an alternative to commercial offerings such as Datasynapse or Digipede. Well now there is a tutorial for running Hadoop on EC2 (via Andrew Newman’s More News). Between this and EC2’s upcoming support for paid AMIs there might be a business opportunity to set up a ‘Software as a Service’ risk management offering for hedge funds; Map/Reduce and the elastic response of EC2 ought to allow the numbers behind complicated trades (magic potion passport options anyone?) to be crunched quickly. I still feel that multicast IP will be an important feature for Amazon to add to EC2 to properly support grid distribution of processing and caching.

ASX CFDs & AXE MIA July 17, 2007

Posted by James Webster in : finance , add a comment

The latest ASX Traders Update newsletter (subscribe here) describes some brief details of their soon-to-be-launched exchange-traded CFDs.

The initial standardised contracts will cover:

  • The top 50 stocks listed on ASX
  • Key global equity indices
  • A range of major foreign currency exchange rates
  • Selected commodities (source: ASX website)

The market-maker model will continue to offer Australian CFDs traders a broader array of underlying instruments in which to trade at the expense of less price transparency and potentially liquidity.

Meanwhile AXE ECN has not updated its website in a while, I wonder how they are progressing towards starting operations in mid-2007? It appears that their exchange system will be provided by Trayport, which the NZX has also adopted.