I had an interesting discussion last night at the LJC developer sessions, and it's a topic that comes up again and again:How do I stay ahead of the curve?  There are so many technologies out there, and more coming along, I can't even keep up with Java, let alone the other JVM languages, HTML5, JavaScript frameworks, NoSQL, Big Data.... argh!Technology, particularly development, seems to move at an ever-increasing pace.  Sure, the Internet makes it a lot easier for us to get...

 
Recently Getco announced two grim figures. Their net income fell 82 percent and revenue declined by 41 percent. Even against the backdrop of the January Effect which has created a sugar-high for the S&P500,  a winning streak just shy of its all-time high of 1565.15 set in 2007, Getco’s losses are sobering news. And they coincide with the precipitous drop in stock-market volume coupled with erratic volatility.  This streak of withering...

My next few talks are where I finally start speaking about MongoDB.  After 4 months working for 10gen, I still feel completely under-qualified to speak with any authority on the subject.  It's very different joining a company with an established and growing product, to joining a very young company and being in on the development since practically day one.  But I've been working on designing the Brand New Java Driver, so that's what I'm going to talk about.At this stage, the new...

This blog post by Ronan Manly was originally published at the Total Trading blog, and is reproduced here with kind permission.
 

Running in conjunction with the World Exchange Congress, High Frequency Trading World is hosting specific discussions on the HFT space.
In the first morning session, Mike O’Hara, CEO and co-founder of the HFT Review, introduced the morning’s proceeding which focused on the topic of Regenerating HFT. Mr O’Hara pointed out that although a lot...

Investment / Trading systems are computer programs that send orders in the capital market. It's technology architecture is designed to support a decision system that sends signals to enter and exit on asset positions (buy and / or sell).What ensures investment efficiency is the ability of these systems on making profit in the long run with the maximum possible security. The big question when we consider these systems is the ability to evaluate the performance and rank it as sufficient to ensure...

The last edition of The Journal of Finance [link] came with good articles, related to financial engineering and capital markets that I would appreciate to list. The Journal of Finance, one of the most prestigious finance journals, was established on 1946. Is one of the most cited journals with distinguished articles like “Portfolio Selection” [link] – Henry Markowitz. The selected articles are: 1 • Ex Ante Skewness and Expected Stock...

The development of trading systems can achieve high degrees of complexity. The process of simulating a particular strategy, termed backtesting can be triggered in several stages of optimization, and monitored at various levels of automation.Developers always seek out new strategies or logical combinations. A system composed of a set of modules, which are interconnected, could trigger many situations.The algorithmic complexity that can arise from this process is very high and if not taken care...

I heard this definition of simulation when I was an undergraduate student. Because it was funny and intuitive, I found it very interesting to use this term to define simulation.The great utility and insight behind this definition is the ability to simulate what I wish.That is, the author of the phrase is not worried about obeying any rules or fixed protocols. Rather, he is concerned to investigate and be flexible.The pure and simple simulation (backtesting) argues and justifies strategies in...

Capital Market Investments are known as being risky process, requiring an adequate Risk Management (see Financial Risk Management , Volatility vs. Risk, HFT Risk ). Trading Systems are not out of this group, but trading systems have a particular element: It´s a systematic approach. Systematic doesn´t means profitable, however means tractable (see Financial Automation and Control: a new age).When I say tractable, I’m referring to the mathematical model, where all the variables and parameters are...

Automation is the application of techniques that reduce human labor and maximize production with fewer costs. We can apply automation on every process that we wish to get done fast. On finance, the automation are on the algorithms that we see keeping and retrieving data, report summarizing, data-mining, etc. There´s no doubt that the need of automation is very large. That are so much things that we wish to be done in milliseconds, many simulations, analysis or data processing that we have to...