FX Settlements

The CLS website has a great picture on how settlements work for FX trades. Here it is:





CLS is a bank set up by a consortium of different financial firms. It what my client uses for settling their FX trades.


©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

Services for the Wall Street Stack

I have blogged before about the need for a standardized Wall Street Stack. At my current client, there are several different frameworks that have been built over the years, but no framework has gained enterprise-wide acceptance.

These are the services that are generally needed for a complete application framework. If you can think of any other, let me know.


Authentication - logging in to various databases, web servers, internal systems, etc. Best implemented through an enterprise-wide authentication service (using the user's Kerberos token, etc)

Authorization (Entitlements) - what actions can a user perform within an application and what data is a user entitled to see. Best accomplished through an enterprise-wide system.

Logging - log interesting things that happen in an application. Log4Net is a good framework.

User Preferences - load and save the state of the UI

User Data - each application may want to persist the last state of the application when the user logged off

Configuration - Each application should be configurable through a series of XMl files.

General Services Manager - drives the entire service locator framework

Applet Management - load applets from .NET assemblies

Internal Event Broker - lightweight communication between applets

Data and Persistence layer - ways to load, query, update and cache data. Should be configurable so that we can go through different transport layers

Service Agents - processed async notifications that come to us through subscriptions.

Shell - handles initialization of the application, calls all of the various services, provides presentation services for the applets

UI - menu manager, status bar manager, navbar manager, toolbar manager

Security/Cryptography - does the data need to be encrypted and decrypted? (passwords, sensitive data)

Exception Handling - provides a unified way of handling errors that occur in shell and the various applets

Threading - model for async processing


©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

Universal DBs

Lately, I have been talking with IT directors at various financial firms. There seems to be one consistent message --- The holy grail that all of the financial firms are seeking is the universal database, where all trades across all asset classes can be held.

This is especially problematic at financial firms who keep buying other firms (Wachovia, Bank of America).

OLAP is a hot skill right now, and companies what to perform sophisticated queries over huge amounts of data. Finetix currently is working in the OLAP space int he commodities area of a major financial firm. This firm has asked Finetix to invent a cloning machine so we duplicate our 3 OLAP stars and sprinkle them throughout the firm. Maybe I should start attending Andrew Brust's presentations at the various .NET user groups.

©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

How Do They Find Me?

I have been getting a bunch of calls from recruiters at my desk at my current client. I think that they know the telephone prefixes of the IT departments at the various Wall Street companies. The recruiters call every single number with that prefix in the middle of the night, and wait for the voice mail to kick in. So, they can get a name of a person at a desk at a Wall Street company.

The calls then come....

Recruiter : Hi Marc. I know someone who worked with you at your last company and they thought you were great.

Me (seeing the bullshit form a mile away) : That's fantastic! What company was that?

Recruiter : (sound of frantic typing in the background). Did you say that this was Marc Adler? Hmmm... it was ... XYZ.

Me : Who was the person that referred you?

Recruiter : Let me tell you about this position.

Me : (hangs up)

A recruiter's opening line says everything about his veracity and ethics. If a recruiter comes across like a telemarketer, I will not deal with him. A better line might be :

Recruiter : Hi Marc. I have been retained by Bank of America to hire a team that needs to build a credit derivatives system. Their platform will be a .NET front end, Java backend, wired together by Tibco EMS. Since you are working now for XYZ, and since I know that their credit derivatives systems use that precise technology, I was wondering if you or any of your teammates would be interesting in implementing a system like this over at BofA. Of course, the compensation would be above and beyond your current salary, which given your level, I could probably take a guess at.

Why is this good? I find out the name of the company who is hiring, and I already know that it's not with the company that I am currently with. (The worst thing is to find out that the job is for your position at your current company!). I see that the recruiter has taken the time to find out that I am with the credit derivs area, and has taken the time to know that my current client uses a particular technology. I see that the recruiter is aware of current salaries and could divine what it would take for an established player to move to another company.

I don't want to have to play games with a recruiter to find out about a position. Be straight, be honest. If I am truly interested in something, then I will not do an end-run around you.

Also, do you guys realize that, if you call me in the middle of the day, then the 5 people who sit around me usually hang on every word that I say on the phone?


©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

Interesting Call From Microsoft Recruiting

It used to be where millions of applicants would send their resumes to Microsoft in hopes of a job. Howver, this is not your father's Microsoft anymore. The stock has been in the shitter for the past few years (I sold mine for a split-adjusted price of $30 in 2001, and the stock has never gotten higher), and the options program has been dessimated.

Somehow, a Microsoft recruiter got a hold of my name from some past colleague. There is a developer evangalist position open in the New York/New Jersey area. I happen to know the person who just left that position; he had been a familiar face at the various New Jersey .NET User Group meetings. This is not a bad position .... you get to go to companies and user groups around the NYC/NJ area and talk about the latest MS technologies from a developer perspective.

So, this recruiter kept calling and calling. I was not interested in the position at all, but I wanted to get another data point and hear what MS was offering senior-level architects and devs now. She would call me in the middle of the day, at my desk at my client, and I would patiently explain to her that I could not talk about a new job with 5 people sitting around me. She would make plans to call me in the evening, but then had to go pick up her kids somewhere, watch her neighbor's kids, etc. Always some excuse.

We finally managed to connect this week. She started to explain the job to me, but I told her that I was already very familiar with the responsibilities of the position. I told her to get down to brass tacks. What were they paying? I told her what my current base salary was so that we could start negotiating. My hopes would be that she could come close to the base,

She looked in her little black book, muttered to herself "hmmm... since this IS in the New York area, we have to give you a boost in the base", and came up with a number that is about 40% less than what I am making in base salary now.

To top it off, she then asked me why I would leave my current position for one that paid 40% less. This got me a bit steamed. I told her that:

a) It was YOU who have been persuing me, not the other way around. I never said anything about wanting to leave my current position.

b) I would NEVER leave for 40% less, unless it was topped off by outright stock grants that would raise my total comp to a figure that was way over the base (something that they will not guarantee for this position).

c) I told her that I was an avid reader of the Mini-Microsoft blog (she said something like "Oh No!"), and that under the current conditions at Microsoft, I don't think that I would be interested in subjecting myself to that type of lifestyle. In addition, I was not interested in interviewing with some 25-year old pisher who would be asking me logic questions like "How Do You Move Mount Fuji?".

She asked me if I had any colleagues who would be interested, whereby I replied that all of my colleagues who might be interested were making a lot more money than you just offered. I told her that I would never consider at MS until there was evidence of a complete culture change and/or there was sustained upwards movement in the stock price. I told her that she should study Mini-Microsoft very carefully, and note the exodus from her her company.

What an amazing turnaround for the prestige of Microsoft, a company that I used to admire. I consulted for MS for 3 years back from 198901992, writing the first front end for SQL Server. My former MS manager is a group VP, and is a millionaire many times over. But, I am afraid that most of the bright lights there have now been dimmed.



©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

What I am doing now

At my new client, one of the Tier-1 IBs on Wall Street, I am now in charge of a FX Exception Processing System. What this system does is allow FX Operations to examine and fix any FX trades which did not go through for one reason or another.

The front end is all C#/.NET, communicating with a Java trade engine using both Web Services and a home-grown XML message broker. Sybase is the database, and from the backend, connectivity is to both CLS and to SWIFTNet.

The GUI uses the Infragistics toolset, and is very grid-intensive. The real-time element is not crucial, and the trade volume is light enough so that we do not have to consider switching to the SyncFusion grid right now.

Any FX Trade Events (in this system, notification of a broken trade is called an 'event') that occur are sent from the backend to our GUI using the message broker. All FX Trades are also sent to our GUI. If the trade that comes in matches a filter criteria that is set up in one of the grids, then the trade is updated (or, in some events, the trade is deleted from the grid).

As more and more groups come on line and use our system, we will be runing into scalability issues. For example, let's say that you have a grid open that is monitoring all trades that occur today. Let's also say that no filtering criteria is set up, other than the fact that you want to look at today's trades. This means that every new trade will be inserted into the top of the grid. This is OK for now, as the trade volume is relatively light. But, more groups have expressed using our GUI. We anticipate that, by the end of the year, we might experience 10x the volume we have now.

I am going to be writing some stress-testing tools that will help us analyze the possible impact of other groups using our system. More on this later.

©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

Comings and Goings

In the United States, men are glued to their TV sets, watching the National Football League's annual college draft. This is the time when 26 football teams throw a ridiculous amount of money at elite college atheletes.

On Wall Street, the annual post-bonus dance is almost complete. As people received their bonus checks in February or March, news comes almost every day that this person or that person has departed for company X or Y. This has dessimated several's company's IT departments, as the one person who knows a certain application inside and out is suddenly no more .... and the mad scramble for talent starts anew as companies try to backfill these positions.

(Wall Street is very small ... never burn your bridges.)

Just like the NFL draft, those of us in Wall Street IT sit back and await news to see where our colleagues end up. Such is the situation with me. I sit back and monitor the blogs, anxiously waiting to see where Matt, Pin, and Deglan end up. Matt announced his resignation on his blog, and invited all comers to bid on his services. In his last blog post, he said that he had many offers from his blog readers. Whoever the lucky company is who ends up with Matt, it will be money well spent.

The bar has been raised slightly in terms of compensation packages for senior developers. On Wall Street, a total compensation package of slightly over $200K is becoming more common. The calls from headhunters are becoming more frantic, as Wall Street scrambles to fill positions of their dearly departed developers. The base salary seems to still be $150K, but on Wall Street, bonus is everything. Managing Directors typically make 200-300% in bonus. Developers are still in the 30-40% range in most companies,except for the premier companies, where your 18-hour days might get you upwards of 80%. But, as a colleague of mine told me recently, many a marriage has been sacrificed in exchange for that bonus.

©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved