Solace CEO to keynote HPoWS with Andy Bechtolsheim
This week the conference organizers of High Performance on Wall Street announced that Solace’s CEO Craig Betts will be joining Andy Bechtolsheim — a founder of Sun Microsystems and countless other successful startups, most recently Arista Networks — for a morning keynote at the event. They will speak on the role of technology in the ever-changing world of financial services. The conference agenda is available online here.
High frequency trading comes under fire by NY Times
Late last week the NY Times printed an article on how Goldman and others are using what they’re calling “high-frequency trading” to get ahead of the market and generate profits.
This is not new news to folks on Wall St, nor is it illegal. As opposed to “front running” scandals of the past where trading firms would use inside information to profit from coming news, all of these advantages are achieved after information has been made public. They just get to see it before everyone else by having faster infrastructure, even if it is only a few milliseconds, or microseconds faster. This is like an astronomer getting a better view of planetary objects by having a better telescope. You dramatically increase your likelihood of discovering something good up there if you get a telescope as good as the US government scientists.
Recently, Ralph Frankel, Solace’s CTO of financial services, had an article published on this topic in Securities Industry News. If you’re interested in this topic, it goes into much more depth about how latency arbitrage in high-frequency trading actually works.
Datamonitor report on messaging
Rik Turner of Datamonitor has released a very thorough report on the messaging space, keying in on the hardware vs software approaches. He does a nice job of representing the position of many vendors and summarizing their offerings. In the report, Rik covers network processors, FPGAs, RDMA/LDMA, TCP accelerators, OS context switches and more.
I don’t agree with all of his opinions, but IMO it’s a far more meaty, solid piece of work than most analyst reports.
Espionage on Wall St
Last year, Tabb Group famously researched the value of a millisecond in an automated trading environment. I wonder what the value of the secret trading strategies from one of the industry’s benchmark leaders is?
A Reuters blogger is reporting that a disgruntled former employee (Sergey Aleynikov) appears to have stolen Goldman’s program trading source code and uploaded it to a server somewhere in Germany. He was arrested June 4th and is being held on charges of “theft of trade secrets”. It’s a scene more out of James Bond than Jersey City, but it appears to be for real.
Goldman’s program trading platform is a crown jewel within the massively profitable firm. It will be interesting to see if any more information is made public, if there is fallout from their trade secrets possibly being for sale, and whether they will change their trading strategies.
Dude, where’s my car?
I must admit to having a fondness for stupid buddy movies, dating all the way back to Cheech and Chong. While Up in Smoke may be a timeless classic, I’m afraid that Dude, Where’s My Car? and more recently The Hangover are destined to show their age more quickly. Why? Because they’re based on the premise of losing track of where you’ve been, and that’s about to become an obsolete concept. Tiger in the bathroom? Ok. Too wasted to remember getting a tattoo? I can see that. No record of where you where for the past 24 hours? No way! That notion will soon be as outdated as Dr. Evil’s “one miiillion” dollar ransom demand.
Why? Because for starters, our computers know where we are thanks to their IP addresses. The new version of FireFox that was announced earlier this week supports location-aware browsing. And of course our phones know where we are — I’ve spent the past few months working with Google Latitude, Yahoo!FireEagle, Whrll, Brightkite, Poynt, and numerous other location-based applications available on the iPhone and Blackberry. I’m convinced that our daily comings and goings are sure to be continuously and anonymously tracked, and with our consent, put in a personalized and social context. And with the next generation of cars bundling in wireless telematics, it’s not just our computers and our phones that will be continuously tracked.
We’re already seeing stories like “Kidnapped Woman Saved By Misplaced BlackBerry” and this hilarious adventure involving “Lego, a dive bar, and some fast urban walking“. Location is fast becoming the latest datatype in the growing trend toward the real-time Web. Location streams are the new click streams. They’re a goldmine of information to be captured, crunched, analyzed, and turned into advertising and retail profit.