Security Industry News interviewed me in my role as America's Regional Co-chair of FIX Protocol Ltd. on the upcoming Options Symbology Initiative (OSI), the long overdue upgrade to options symbology within US markets. My compliments to my former employer, The Options Clearing Corporation for taking on the role of the bad guy to force the industry to do something that should have been done many years ago.

...the problem with the sudden popularity of high-frequency trading is that it may increasingly destabilize the market. Hedge funds won’t necessarily care whether the increased volatility causes stocks to rise or fall, as long as they can get in and out quickly with a profit. But the rest of the economy will care.

Great article on TechCrunch!

The listed derivatives industry market structure, regulated but still efficient and effective, survived the global financial crisis relatively intact. The overall banking industry did not fair as well. Yet, we are seeing moves afoot in the US to change the regulatory regime for listed derivatives.

From a Tabb Group report on latency:

Here is a link to the reform white paper from the White House http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/reform.pdf

The white paper is interesting in how much is left unchanged – on a net basis there are still about the same number of regulatory entities, despite some merging of responsibilities on the bank side. It is not unreasonable to conclude that this is a typical response to a crisis as opposed to some radical major reform and restructuring. Alas, it harkens back to Sarbanes-Oxley layering of regulations as opposed to restructuring.

The guys who run the Transaction Level Analysis blog had some interesting posts about using Cloud Computing in Trading. Looks like GigaSpaces is turning this into reality with their release of the Cloud Computing Framework:

The following are a few public references that chose to use XAP:

From the FINETIK blog:

Some people believe data modeling has become very passé these days. The belief is that because data modeling theory is more than 30 years old and, because some data modeling tools have been around for 10 to 20 years, somehow data modeling is no longer relevant. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, data modeling may now be more necessary than ever before.

Via Infectious Greed

Well, this is not strictly business related, but hey, Lasalletech is all about expanding the boundaries.

Check out Michael Tyznik's entries to the Dollar Rede$ign Project.