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.

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.

Automating Dodd-Frank

After a few weeks of hiatus, I'm pleased that we've posted another Financial Tech Talk audio interview on the  Sell-Side Technology website.

In this first part of two-part interview with industry veteran Ciaran Henry, we sit down and discuss how firms are coping with Dodd Frank's real-time and intra-day reporting requirements for OTC trading.

Please check back for when we post the second part of the interview, in which we look at how firms can leverage their existing low-latency trading infrastructure for this new electronically traded market.

UPDATE: We've posted the second portion of the audiocast here.

Is FTL Messaging Getting Closer?

Although the experiment's results still need to be replicated, CERN researchers believe that some of the neutrinos that they fired along a 730 km-long testbed arrived traveling faster than the speed of light. If other particle physicists are able to replicate the feat, this could revolutionize messaging.

I've written a few thoughts about the subject in my weekly editor's letter for Sell-Side Technology.

I've also been on a quantum mechanics kick for a few months now that has lead me to write a piece in the October issue of Waters magazine on the the current state of quantum computing and how it could be used on Wall Street ($$).

This nascent technology is far from being a computing panacea, but it's capable of changing the rules of the game and further separating the technology haves and have-nots.

The Debt

Saying good-bye to summer this afternoon, I caught a matinee of The Debt. This good spy thriller owes a lot to John Ford's classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Instead of following the life and career of an idealistic lawyer in the American Old West, it follows the lives of three Mossad agents who participate in a Cold War era capture an extract mission to bring a Nazi surgeon to justice. This film, however, takes a much grittier and realistic view of when history and mythology collide. It is definitely worth the price of admission.