I’m still unclear why in this day and age there is confusion around Stories, Epics and Themes. Mike’s posting from 2011 should have made it quite clear to the masses what the difference was between an Stories, Epics and Themes. So to anyone who is shamefully unclear still on the difference between an Stories, Epics and Themes, please read Mike Cohn’s posting, and consider spending a large amount of time reading the other articles he has posted, coupled with his books to “educate” yourself.

Wall Street & Technology’s article “JPMorgan To Be Haunted by Change in Risk Model” touches on a few items I mentioned in my European Trading Architecture Summit last year.

Interesting video over on Lodestone’s WordPress site

Overview available here. The PDF is available is you are interested in the full read. After a view brief read, my initial comments would be that some of the diagram are interesting, but its a little to high level for me.

The debate appears to be still raging on if/when the Java final keyword should be be used It reminds me of the OS debate of the 90′s. What’s your view?

Wall Street & Technologies article “Financial Firms Can’t Ignore iPad and Android Tablet Apps” provides insight into how the financial vertical is leverage the uptake of the iPad. I wonder if the financial sector will embrace Windows 8 Metro in the same way? Likewise, will all new Single Bank/Dealer Platforms be released first on the iPad before the desktop browser multi-window version is offered?

Finextra has an interesting article titled “Outdated core systems a drag on growth for European banks”. Essentially this means that the European banks need to spend and improve their core system to improve gains in the Single Dealer/Bank Platform space.

providing a unified customer experience across channels is an issue for about half of European banks, impacting their ability to effectively cross-sell

First, lets clear up what “Follow the Sun” trading means.

The spot FX market is unique to any other market in the world, as trading is available 24-hours a day. Somewhere around the world, a financial center is open for business, and banks and other institutions exchange currencies, every hour of the day and night with generally only minor gaps on the weekend. Essentially foreign exchange markets follow the sun around the world, giving traders the flexibility of determining their trading day.

A quick read on Dummies “Liquidity and the Foreign Exchange Market” provides a view on liquidity. Of particular importance:

Forex market liquidity will vary throughout each trading day as global financial centers open and close in their respective time zones

Armed with this information, we can now turn to FCM360 “Foreign Exchange Hosting, Colocation & Connectivity” article that provide a good overview of the various FX venues and Colo’s.

Looking at the FCM360 network diagram, ignoring the fact that its FCM360, the choice of location for an FX pricing engine of a sell-side company is usually going to be either New York or London, or both. The “both” are often chosen to leverage “Follow the sun” from a liquidity perspective. What this means is that since Asia and European open before the US, during the course of a trading data, the ideal location of the Pricing Engine would be in London to reduce latency and sit closer to the liquidity centers. As the liquidity moves through the trading day, it maybe advantageous to swing the Pricing Engine to New York to gain a latency advantage. Obviously the swinging of a Pricing Engine from one locations to another needs to be well managed and leverage an appropriate software architecture, otherwise there could be costly implications.

Risk management could also take advantage of “Follow the Sun”, since the market data and hence risk calculations that leverage this data and the trade portfolio’s if located close to the source of the changing data, can themselves reduce the data movement over a LAN/WAN, and thereby speed up the overall calculation time.

e-Forex’s article “Utilizing cloud computing architectures for improved control over risk and FX back-office operations” offers a few views on cloud usage by the Foreign Exchange space. The main just of the article being the value of compute power to calculate FX risk in almost real-time, especially with the increase in HFT:

HFT in FX is a rapidly changing market where strategies need to be adapted to changing market conditions, and hosted solutions provide a suitable alternative

Fund administrators appear to be one area that should be focused on cloud migration, and leveraging the compute resources to understand the risk of the portfolio, and presumably run “what-if” scenarios.

Wall St & Technology offers an interesting read on Rosenblatt Securities proprietary platform that analysis and visualizes big data. Of interest:

• Tableau for visualization
• GPU powered server to process tick and quotes from US exchanges
• EC2 for storage
• Proprietary database