In this interview, we talk to Capital Markets veteran John Lowrey, Global Head of Electronic Trading and DMA Services at Marex Spectron who, during a long and illustrious career in the City, has held senior positions at Goldman Sachs, Knight Securities, Lehman Brothers, Nomura and Chi-X.
 
A true pioneer of electronic trading infrastructure and services, John shares his thoughts on a wide range of topics, including how and why markets are becoming more correlated; the true cost...

So, like one of my presentations, I have a question for you.  Actually, I have more than one question for you.  I'm not going to bother with survey monkey or whatever, I want to share the answers so please, answers in the comments:Are you using the Java driver for MongoDB in your application?Are you using the Java driver directly, or are you using a third party library like Morphia, Spring Data, the Scala driver, you're own abstraction layer, etc?If you're using a third party library,...

By Theo Hildyard at the Progress Software Capital Markets Blog

Imagine this scenario:  you represent a firm doing business in capital markets whose business model depends on innovative and agile use of technology.  You are being impacted by the recent regulatory initiatives requiring brokers-dealers to have better risk controls in place with respect to Automated Trading and HFT.   These changes may have come from ESMA in Europe, SEBI in India, ASIC in...

The National Physics Laboratory (the NPL) held an interesting Q&A this morning on accurate time stamping. The presentation also involved the UK FCA and the (ex-)Chief Scientific Adviser to HMG, Sir John Beddington. The main topic of the discussion was what role Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) (of which NPL is the UK’s ‘keeper’) could play in time stamping for the financial markets.
 
The FCA’s concerns were that:

the markets and their regulators...

Last Tuesday I went to a London Java Community talk which promised to debunk the hype around NoSQL.  Whether you're already bought into a NoSQL technology, or you're just wondering what all the noise is about, it's worth an hour out of your day to see Akmal Chaudhri's comprehensive summary of the technologies out there.Skillsmatter recorded the whole thing, as usual, so you can watch the presentation for yourself.  I promise neither I nor anyone else from 10gen paid him to mention...

So, despite promising myself that I would only do one event a month for the rest of this year, looks like I'm going to be a bit busier than that. In case you're wondering what I'm up to (or, even better, hoping to see me talk or meet me), here are my confirmed engagements:15-17 May - GeeCon, Poland18-20 June - GOTO Amsterdam - whole day tutorial on the new (unfinished) MongoDB Java driver.24th June - STAC Summit, London - something MongoDB-shaped (i.e. not Java-specific)27th June -...

 
This article was originally published at the Fidessa Regulation Matters blog, and is reproduced here with permission.
 
By Robin Strong
The buy-side has traditionally been spared from the burden of most regulatory trade reporting requirements, passing this responsibility on to their brokers who hold the exchange memberships. But this principle looks to have been challenged by BaFin, the German financial regulator, with the introduction of its High Frequency Trading...

With regulatory pressure on the increase, the entire financial industry is seemingly on tenterhooks to see just how these new directives from EMIR to MiFID II, Basel III to Dodd Frank, will pan out. The result of this uncertainty? Lack of preparation. According to a report from consultancy Celent titled ‘Impacts of EMIR for the Buy-Side: The Greater Good, But a Greater Cost’, less than one third of Asset Managers are prepared at the operational level for the changes in post-trade...

 
This article was originally published at Financial Sense and is reproduced here with the author's permission
 
Aside from the Federal Reserve and its policies, there is probably no other more controversial force in the financial markets today than high frequency trading. Since today also happens to be the three year anniversary of the Flash Crash—the very event that thrust HFT into the public spotlight—let’s take a moment and consider this topic from...

 
This article was originally published at the Fidessa Regulation Matters blog, and is reproduced here with permission.
 
By Christian Voigt
Earlier this week BaFin, the German regulator, held a workshop on the German HFT Act. Global market participants gathered in Frankfurt to discuss and better understand the implications of the soon to be passed law. Questions around the definition of HFT, registration as an HFT firm when operating from abroad and the identification...