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StockTwits takes it to the next level September 2, 2009

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

The long decline of Bloomberg continues… StockTwits has launched a desktop application based on Adobe AIR (further reporting from TechCrunch). The list of features is pretty impressive;

Presumably porfolio management features might be integrated as well. I also wonder if they could take a big step further and build in some rudimentary FIX API integration… especially if they want to attempt to sell into the ‘pro-am’ daytrading market, although brokers that make FIX access available for daytraders at a price they can afford tend to be hard (impossible?) to find. Maybe StockTwits next step will be to set up a brokerage themselves?

Tis the season for consolidation August 25, 2009

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

Tibco buys Datasynapse, which is pretty big news for the City since most derivatives houses probably have one or the other. Will this sort of consolidation at the big end of the market scare some architects off and make them focus on open-source players such as GridGain? Are there any grid deployments running GridGain for production intraday & overnight risk at a bank?

Open-source is no stranger to the consolidation trend either;

Terracotta acquires Ehcache: from a capital markets perspective, Oracle’s Coherence (which itself arised from acquiring Tangosol) seems to be the 500lb gorilla in the ‘in memory data grid’ space. The combination of Terracotta and a deeply integrated Ehcache might be an appropriate alternative solution for the primary use case of Coherence in bank deployments; a market data/trade/position/risk cache & time series database.

VMware acquires SpringSource which itself acquired Hyperic: VMware is gearing itself up to be a major cloud player by offering a complete virtualised Java development stack, after all isn’t the recently announced CloudFoundry Java’s answer to Microsoft and .Net’s Windows Azure? Is a database acquisition or purchase of Splunk that far away?

Co-operation rather than consolidation; the open source trading platform Marketcetera has established close relationships with Sky Road and NYSE Technologies’ to provide a hosted solution for Marketcetera. Given Marketcetera uses Spring extensively some involvement with CloudFoundry is a possibility as well.

More AXE grinding August 24, 2009

Posted by James Webster in : finance , add a comment

It appears that there finally will be some movement in the halting efforts to introduce greater competition to Australian capital markets. The federal government has decided to move market & trading supervision responsibilities to ASIC in addition to its existing role as the cop enforcing the Corporations Act, and away from the ASX’s Market Supervision subsidiary. Clearly it would be untenable for ASX to have any function performing a regulatory role in an environment with multiple trading venues; the ASX would be regulating its competitors regardless of how “at arm’s length” the relationship with ASX Market Supervision is.

As an IT practitoner in financial markets that is moving from London back to Australia this is good news for me personally, but I do believe that greater competition (and therefore lower transaction costs) will attract significantly higher investment inflows. However the government will have to be prepared to fund ASIC adequately. I wonder if AXE/Chi-X etc can be convinced to start a new financial hub in Brisbane?!

Further coverage at Finextra and the Sydney Morning Herald.