Equities Transaction Reporting: 10 Seconds

The new trade reporting rules will require FINRA members to report executions or cancellations of trades in National Market System and over-the-counter stocks in no more than 10 seconds.

Bloomberg Terminal: The Big Brother In Every Financial Institution

NY Times has an article around the usage of Boomberg terminal data to provide the Bloomberg New division with a competitive edge over the competition.  In all honesty, its not really surprising, especially given the BBG terminal is in every bank, central banks, rival news organizations, Congress and even the Vatican, coupled with the fact that BBG Chat is historically one of the main communication channels for the last n years.

On less frequent occasions, reporters also monitored chats between those subscribers and customer service representatives

The above obviously leads to the next question, how many of the non-customer service representative chats are monitored……..

Omega and Mesos

“Return of the Borg: How Twitter Rebuilt Google’s Secret Weapon” on Wired provides an overview of how Google is moving from Borg to Omega, and Twitter on the Mesos road.  Mesos provides isolation of tasks via the Linux container which has gained traction for obvious reasons.

Watching the 2011 GAFS Omega John Wilkes video and reading the articles linked above, one can’t help thinking that DataSynapse and Platform did well to sell to TIBCO and IBM over the last few years, as in many ways, there products are dead today.  Let’s hope the banks, who historically have had the typical desk silo’d compute cluster calculating risk etc (paying licensing fees to DataSyanpse/Platform) are looking at the advances that Twitter and Google are making in resourcing sharing.

The Twelve-Factor App

Worth a read. Dev/Prod Parity is one topic that I see firms always trying to break, with little understanding of the impact of their decisions

Breaking Software: “The Black Team”

I read the story of the black team in some book a long time ago.  My view is that engineers should fear the testing team, and thus provide further emphasis on the important to BDD/TDD and such in the development cycle.  All too often the QA/Testing team in an organisation is disconnected from the engineering team, with the net effect that engineering becomes sloppy about what they throw over the “wall”.

MS Smart Order Router: Keeping Up With The Jones

Interesting read over on Traders Magazine around how Morgan Stanley has upgraded its equities infrastructure – Morgan Stanley Cuts Microseconds from Trading Systems.  I’m curious what specifically is meant by “real-time learning algorithms” within their new smart router.

Also, who were the “enterprise infrastructure specialists”?  I also guessing Solarflare, co-lo, possibly exegy market data, and RoCE at a min

Cucumber and Distributed Application Testing – Part 2

Continuing on from the previous posting.  If one decided to annotate the PlantUML flows with max latency data one could then possibly consider leveraging Application Tap for Solarflare from a cucumber test  perspective to capture the hop latency, and validate the flows via the data capture database.  Anyone tried such a thing?