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Clearing and settlement February 18, 2009

Posted by James Webster in : finance , add a comment

I came across Clearing and Settlement News today, an interesting blog commenting upon and summarising some of the key issues and news in the clearing and settlement industry. As I’ve said previously this is an area that will only continue to grow and become more complicated, especially given the pressure on the industry to clear exotic OTC derivatives in a transparent and prompt fashion.

The author, Scott Riley is a director with Chi-X . He has also provided links on his blog to additional reporting on the proposed launch of new ECN’s in Australia, something I have covered a bit here (#1, #2, #3, #4) but not been watching lately. No doubt he is being given all sorts of fun headaches by ASIC’s softly-softly approach to actually opening the market up to new entrants.

If you want more info on clearing and settlement processes, Michael Simmons’ Securities Operations (Amazon UK / Amazon US) is an excellent choice.

twitter ticker February 13, 2009

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

My favourite Twitter client TweetDeck has been updated to include built-in support for the day-trading Twitter community StockTwits (via ReadWriteWeb);

You can think of it as Bloomberg for the little guy and gal.

Or more cynically, another place for uninformed traders (aka gamblers) to fall victim to pump and dump scams?

Clearly Twitter is no replacement for professional trading tools. That said, IM plays a significant role on many trading floors these days; the next time I am on ours I’ll keep an eye out for TweetDeck! There are a few other Twitter tools with a financial focus. Fred Wilson recommends mytrade’s Twitter quote bot. It would be interesting to see Twitter integration with a stock screening application as well… “@trader AAPL is trending above VWAP“.

I would sign up to StockTwits but I am less than keen on giving out my Twitter credentials. The sooner Twitter supports an OAuth-style authorisation mechanism for 3rd party websites the better. Despite signing up for Loic Le Meur’s Team Seesmic-Twhirl to try out Twhirl’s Seesmic integration (hmmm… is there a possible StockTwits and Seesmic overlap for a crowd-sourced Internet alternative to CNBC?) I gave it a miss when it required signing up for yet another social network account; between a handful of OpenID’s and Google/Facebook/Twitter account I think I am now waiting for them all to just start letting me cross-authenticate.

Finally, a plug for my own Twitter feed.

DataSynapse on Amazon EC2 February 12, 2009

Posted by James Webster in : finance, virtualization, development , add a comment

DataSynapse have just announced a service and beta program for running their grid computing platform on the Amazon EC2 service (press release here). It is only open to existing DataSynapse customers but those who do sign up will be able to run the DataSynapse engine on as many EC2 instances without incurring licensing costs during the beta period, just the CPU and transfer fees from Amazon.

In my experience DataSynapse is the grid vendor with the greatest market share in the financial services sector. I sometimes wonder why however; deployment of gridlibs can sometimes be flakey and the administration interface leaves a little to be desired (although to be fair I haven’t seen the very latest GUI). Still its good to see the major grid computing vendor supporting Amazon EC2 as a first-class host for their software. The open-source Java grid platform GridGain are allegedly working on deep EC2 integration and it will be interesting to see what they come up with.

A few other interesting and unrelated tid-bits: