Showing posts with label Friday Musings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Friday Musings. Show all posts

January 6, 2012

CFTC Won't Make SEF Deadline

No, it's not a reported fact, but just a humble opinion in this week's Friday Musing that the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is overoptimistic in its belief that it will have all of the necessary Dodd-Frank rule making completed by the middle of this quarter.

Disagree? Let me know your thoughts on the matter.

December 16, 2011

Defining the Indefinable

Earlier this week CFTC Commissioner Scott O'Malia chaired a meeting of the regulator's Technology Advisory Committee. As part of the discussion, a number of market participants, regulators and researchers presented their opinions on how the regulator might define high frequency trading. I toss in my two cents with this week's Friday Musings. You can view the entire session online here - just forward the video to the 215:00 mark.

December 9, 2011

Will Cloud Computing Survive the Regulators?

It came as no surprise that of the two recurring themes of this week's Waters USA conference in Manhattan were cloud computing and the impact of new global regulatory environment on banks' global IT infrastructure.

This week's Friday Musing looks at the intersection of these trends: Can financial firms deploy new global cloud-based infrastructures in light of the recent data and application retention policies set forth by various national regulators?


November 4, 2011

Low Latency in the Middle and Back Office

How can sell-side firms leverage their low-latency trading technology to handle the new levels of regulatory and client reporting? 

I've scribbled a few thoughts on the topic at Sell-Side Technology.

October 28, 2011

The Nature of the OTC Beast

The US Commodities Futures Trading Committee (CFTC) expects to have its final rules for swaps execution facilities completed in approximately five months and have have swap dealers operating in the new environment 90 days after that.

The more I follow the heavy lifting that remains in this rule-making process, the more obvious it is that the rules will take much longer than the remaining five months to hammer out. 

Even when the new rules in place, I doubt the markets will operate anywhere close to how the regulators intended.

October 21, 2011

MiFID II First Takes


Yesterday the European Commission published its proposed version of the second draft of Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II) and its associated Markets in Financial Instruments and Amending Regulation (MiFIR). Between these two documents there are approximately 250 pages of the best regulatory reading since The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. I haven't had a chance to go through the documents in their entirety yet, but I've jotted down a few thoughts in this week's Friday Musings.
 

October 14, 2011

Does Half A Standard Work?

Today's Friday Musing looks at whether the US Securities and Exchange Commission's Rule 15c3-5 on pre-trade risk check goes far enough to protect US markets from high-frequency trading and fat-finger mistakes.

October 7, 2011

Warning Lights for Market Circuit Breakers

In this week's Friday Musings, I've taken a quick look at Center for Innovative Financial Technology's (CIFT's) recent white paper entitled "Federal Market Information Technology in the the Post Flash Crash Era: Roles for Supercomputing."

Although the paper's authors discuss how they went about calculating these new market indicators, I'm far more interested on how firms may be able to implement them on their own so that they can avoid trading exposure when a circuit breaker trips.

August 5, 2011

Death of the 5-Year IT Plan?

Is the pace of technological innovation preventing companies from making long-term IT investment plans? Yes, it's basically Alvin  Toffler's FutureShock thesis applied to IT planning and my column for the August issue of Waters.

July 29, 2011

Dodd-Frank: Two Perspectives



For the 2,000 non-viewers of The Daily Show (no relation) who did not see John Stewart and John Oliver's  Schoolhouse Rock-inspired update on the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, this sketch nails it head on for the average consumer and investor. The terms of the Act are very vague and the regulators - the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) are underfunded.

However, covering the wholesale banking industry for the past several years, I have to defend the industry a bit when it comes to winding down such a large market like swaps and spinning up a new one in its place. If you look for a political equivalent for what Dodd-Frank aims to do, it would have to be nation building - just replacing the bullets with bucks. It's easy to tear down a complex system that's developed over decades, but developing a replacement to it is not something that can be accomplished overnight.


July 1, 2011

The New Face of Global Exchanges?

Is there room for more global exchange operators?

If you take the recent TMX Group and LSE Group, the respective operators of the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) and the venerable London Stock Exchange (LSE), the answer appears to be "no."

I wrote this short opinion piece for my day job on the topic.

May 13, 2011

Friday Musings

Just a few day-job thoughts on how cloud computing can become a game changer when it comes to computing security.