The LaSalle Technology Group, LLC is pleased to announce the immediate availability of FIX Explorer(tm) Mobile for the Apple iPhone. FIX Explorer Mobile is an application that provides FIX message formats and fields for all versions of FIX that is fully searchable. The full version of the application is available for free download via the Apple App Store. The application is being provided as a free service to the FIX Community.

Recently a group of the thought leaders within FPL started up the High Frequency Trading Working Group. The goal is to come up with a less verbose encoding for FIX than tag=value and to also streamline order handling semantics and possibly even the session layer.

The snow has arrived up north here in the Lasalletech home office, which gives us time to contemplate the big things in life, or the minute, in the case of high frequency trading messages.

Following incredible claims by major exchanges globally regarding trade execution times in the 100 microsecond level, The LaSalle Technology Group, LLC has been forced to announce their new Tachyon based computing platform which provides -50 picosecond matches. With the new platform code named “B2” aka “Beyond Belief” trades will actually execute prior to the time the trade is submitted. More performance improvements are expected in the near future.

Unfortunately, Skype was likely too valuable a service and too valuable a property to languish under the clear lack of strategy being exhibited by eBay of late.
Private Equity announced a deal to acquire a majority interest in Skype as reported in the Wall Street Journal.

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 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.

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.

It looks like Sprint Nextel will be carrying the Pre from Palm. AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson said in a WSJ article yesterday that AT&T would likely carry the Pre after the exclusivity period with Sprint ends. In the article Stephenson was defending the AT&T Network, although anyone that uses a smartphone or a 3G wireless for their PC in a major metropolitan area during the day realize that the smartphones are crushing the network.

My friend Bill Nichols, Program Director, Securities Processing Automation at SIIA/FISD and a very high bandwidth guy located this article on the web that encapsulates my experiences with standards over the past thirty years. Simple de facto standards are far more successful then de jeure or top down design driven standards. Although this article by John F. Sowa does not mention FIX, it really captures why FIX has been successful and why other protocols have not achieved the same level of success.


The Law of Standards

I think we are starting to come to the realization that the use of XML for real time messaging comes at too great a cost. At one time the thought was that bandwidth and processing power increases would overcome the inefficiencies in parsing XML and in the verbosity of XML messages. What has happened instead as the availability of bandwidth and processing have increased the volume of messages has increased as has the demand for much lower latency. This trend does not bode well for XML.