Here
Terry is sure to have this stuff in our Wiki before I get to London :-)
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Friday, October 27, 2006
Pricing Turbo Warrants
Here
Today was the first I have ever heard about Turbo Warrants.
A Turbo Warrant call is:
- a barrier knock-out option paying a ...
- small rebate to the holder if the barrier is hit and
- with the barrier typically in-the-money.
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Today was the first I have ever heard about Turbo Warrants.
A Turbo Warrant call is:
- a barrier knock-out option paying a ...
- small rebate to the holder if the barrier is hit and
- with the barrier typically in-the-money.
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Thursday, October 26, 2006
The Bile Blog
The Bile Blog is even most cynical and caustic than I am.
Thanks to the ThoughtWorkers at my office for pointing this out. Especially funny are the posts that harpoon the Fowlbots. And, I think that he has even biled yours truly.
This blog is going to take me quite a while to go through ... would be great if Virgin Atlantic had internet connectivity ... I think reading this blog would occupy my entire flight.
By the way ... kudos to our own Fowlbots ... James, Chris, Dave and Alistair. Job well done, boys!
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Thanks to the ThoughtWorkers at my office for pointing this out. Especially funny are the posts that harpoon the Fowlbots. And, I think that he has even biled yours truly.
This blog is going to take me quite a while to go through ... would be great if Virgin Atlantic had internet connectivity ... I think reading this blog would occupy my entire flight.
By the way ... kudos to our own Fowlbots ... James, Chris, Dave and Alistair. Job well done, boys!
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
C++/CLI Opposition
C++/CLI == C++ Divided By CLI
Here
Interesting reading, especially in the light that investment banks have a ton of old Visual C++/6, non-MFC code. The choice is to go to C++/CLI, or start fresh with C#.
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Here
Interesting reading, especially in the light that investment banks have a ton of old Visual C++/6, non-MFC code. The choice is to go to C++/CLI, or start fresh with C#.
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
I am scared of The Wharf
Earlier this year, my former consulting company closed its London office without warning. In a mailing to the staff, the partners said that there was just no business to be had for very smart .Net and Java consultants in Canary Wharf.
I am imaging what kind of place this Wharf could be. When I get there, will I see a lone seaman, in a yellow raincoat, yelling "Ahoy Matey" to me from a distant pier? Are there thugs and holligans behind every dark corner, waiting to roll me for my wallet? Will I see row of cars, inhabited by hormonal teenagers, "watching the submarine races" (a popular saying in the 1950's)?
I am very afraid of this Wharf place. Perhaps JohnOS, Matt, Deglan and Pin can organize a bile-night to keep me off the streets? Perhaps Rut the Nut is reading this blog and will get some of our old Citicorp/EBS gang together for a slosh-up?
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Funny Code
What is the funniest line of code you ever saw? One of the developers at Barcap wrote the following: line in a C# function
if (this == null)
{
}
It absolutely cracked me up (well... I guess you had to be there).
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
if (this == null)
{
}
It absolutely cracked me up (well... I guess you had to be there).
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
London Bound
I will be in London all next week, checking out the happenings in Canary Wharf. I have not been to London for a long time, so it will be interesting to see how built up the Wharf is. More interesting will be to see if they built any quality pubs. Last time I was in London, all of the pubs closed at 11 at night.
One nice thing will be to test our Virgin Atlantic's Business Class. I have been hearing tales of free massages .... hmmm ...
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
One nice thing will be to test our Virgin Atlantic's Business Class. I have been hearing tales of free massages .... hmmm ...
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Sunday, October 22, 2006
Separated at Birth
Chris and I came from the same company, and we were both equally dissatisfied with the kind of body shop work that we were doing at our last client. We both struck out simultaneously to find a place where we could do meaningful work. We landed in very similar positions at two of the largest investment banks in the world.
Funnier still is that we share almost the same technology stack, from front to back. I am sure that right after the conference call that we have with our market data infrastructure vendor, Chris is on the same call an hour later.
Craig mentions that there are only about 200 market data specialists in the whole world. Everyone probably knows what eachother is doing. The same thing goes on in Wall Street, and by extension, the City. The after-bonus-shuffle will take place in another 4 months, and it's an opportunity for every company to find out what every other company is doing.
When you come down to it, we all have very similar technology stacks. We all know which vendors are out there, and we all have done the same kind of performance and stressing comparisons between similar vendors. The goal is to squeeze that one extra millisecond of performance so that your order is hit before your competitor's order. It could be the difference of one extra 'lock' in a piece of code. It will be a race to recruit the Joe Duffy's and Rico Mariani's of the world. All of the IBs will need to recognize the need for these kind of people, and adapt themselves so that these people will not feel stiffled within a Wall Street environment.
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Funnier still is that we share almost the same technology stack, from front to back. I am sure that right after the conference call that we have with our market data infrastructure vendor, Chris is on the same call an hour later.
Craig mentions that there are only about 200 market data specialists in the whole world. Everyone probably knows what eachother is doing. The same thing goes on in Wall Street, and by extension, the City. The after-bonus-shuffle will take place in another 4 months, and it's an opportunity for every company to find out what every other company is doing.
When you come down to it, we all have very similar technology stacks. We all know which vendors are out there, and we all have done the same kind of performance and stressing comparisons between similar vendors. The goal is to squeeze that one extra millisecond of performance so that your order is hit before your competitor's order. It could be the difference of one extra 'lock' in a piece of code. It will be a race to recruit the Joe Duffy's and Rico Mariani's of the world. All of the IBs will need to recognize the need for these kind of people, and adapt themselves so that these people will not feel stiffled within a Wall Street environment.
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
NCache and db4o
Matt is looking at NCache and Chris recommends db4o. Plus Geva is telling us to look at Gigaspaces.
Has anyone does an in-depoth comparison between NCache, db4o, Giga, Gemfire, Tangasol, and any others? Roll-your-owns are also welcome in the comparison.
Hey, hey Microsoft ... what 'ya got cookin'? How 'bout cooking something up for me? Here is the JCP-107 spec. Don't deviate too far from it.
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Has anyone does an in-depoth comparison between NCache, db4o, Giga, Gemfire, Tangasol, and any others? Roll-your-owns are also welcome in the comparison.
Hey, hey Microsoft ... what 'ya got cookin'? How 'bout cooking something up for me? Here is the JCP-107 spec. Don't deviate too far from it.
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Saturday, October 21, 2006
.Net - Java Integration
http://www.infoq.com/articles/java-dotnet-integration-intro
Especially interesting are the comments from Roger Voss, formerely of the Aldus Pagemaker portability team. He has chosen .Net for the front end and Tibco EMS as the messaging layer between his Java and .Net tiers.
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Especially interesting are the comments from Roger Voss, formerely of the Aldus Pagemaker portability team. He has chosen .Net for the front end and Tibco EMS as the messaging layer between his Java and .Net tiers.
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Free .NET Object Cache
Free .NET object cache at CodeProject.
Wonder if the code has been touch for a while, or whether anyone is using this cache...
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Wonder if the code has been touch for a while, or whether anyone is using this cache...
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Concurrency, Joe Duffy and Wall Street
Joe Duffy is soliciting ideas for a new book on concurrency.
Joe's name comes up a lot my talks with Microsoft team that supports me. He and Rico Mariani are two resources from Redmond that I would love to get on an advisory basis. My vision is that they would help us out with optimal .Net architectures for low-latency, high-performance systems.
The elephant in the room that everyone is worried about is the projected Opra feeds of 456,000 messages per second. As I am the Global Architect for Equity Derivatives for one of the largest investment banks in the world, this is something that I am responsible for. As such,the things I need for our stack include high-speed market data feeds with caching and conflation, complex event processing, hardware acceleration, object caches, threading models, efficient GUIs and client-side frameworks, hardware acceleration, super-tight code generation, efficient messaging between components, (and did I mention hardware acceleration?).
From a concurrency point of view, I would like to know what Microsoft considers to be best practices to implement quasi-real-time data processing. Also, what anti-patterns exist and what to avoid in the .Net framework. How to use PerfMon and other third-party performance tools to get the most out of my systems. Coding rules that maximize performance. Things that Microsoft will be releasing (or thinking about) five years down the road.
And, for my own selfish reasons, I would love to see Joe implement a trading system to test out his ideas!
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Joe's name comes up a lot my talks with Microsoft team that supports me. He and Rico Mariani are two resources from Redmond that I would love to get on an advisory basis. My vision is that they would help us out with optimal .Net architectures for low-latency, high-performance systems.
The elephant in the room that everyone is worried about is the projected Opra feeds of 456,000 messages per second. As I am the Global Architect for Equity Derivatives for one of the largest investment banks in the world, this is something that I am responsible for. As such,the things I need for our stack include high-speed market data feeds with caching and conflation, complex event processing, hardware acceleration, object caches, threading models, efficient GUIs and client-side frameworks, hardware acceleration, super-tight code generation, efficient messaging between components, (and did I mention hardware acceleration?).
From a concurrency point of view, I would like to know what Microsoft considers to be best practices to implement quasi-real-time data processing. Also, what anti-patterns exist and what to avoid in the .Net framework. How to use PerfMon and other third-party performance tools to get the most out of my systems. Coding rules that maximize performance. Things that Microsoft will be releasing (or thinking about) five years down the road.
And, for my own selfish reasons, I would love to see Joe implement a trading system to test out his ideas!
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Friday, October 20, 2006
Financial Systems Books
I just got the new Third Edition of the classic After the Trade is Made. At a first glance, it looks like they have fattened up the book a bunch, and added a chapter on trading systems. I will report later on the quality of this chapter if I can get a block of free time to read it.
A decent companion to this book is Practical .Net for Financial Markets. I ordered this book after reading my colleague Ted's glowing review of the book on Amazon. I have to admit that, for me, the book was a bit on the disappointing side. The book has a little bit of everything ... a simple crossing engine, some messaging (designed to illustrate how STP works), some encryption, some good example of networking, etc.
However, what seems to be missing from the marketplace is a great book that deals with the entire spectrum of financial instruments from a developer's point of view. Something that will not only discuss the business domain and underlying technology, but will also point to real products that implement the various systems. A deep dive for the developer to become completly immersed in Wall Street systems.
For example, let's take Equities. From a systems standpoint, I want to know what goes on from the time that a trade is entered until someone receives confirmation through snailmail. I want to know what an order entry system does, how trades are routed to the exchanges, how FIX messaging is used, how crossing engines and auto-execution engines work, how stat arb and algorithmic trading factors in, how market-making functions, how settlment is done, how positions are maintained and how P&L are calculated, how market data gets into a system, how risk is calculated, etc. I want to know how systems and vendors like Bloomberg, Fidessa, Reuters, Wombat, Vhayu, etc fit into this space.
In addition, I would like to see topics that are tangental in nature, but geared towards the financial systems developer. How to develop low-latency systems. How to write UI's with fast-updating grids of market data. How to use complex event processing to implement stat arb trading. How to do order routing efficiently using rules engines.
I want a complete end-to-end picture. I want FinancialSystemsPedia.
My former colleague Matt was thinking about writing this kind of book several years ago. I think that there is a real need for this kind of knowledge to be put on paper.
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
A decent companion to this book is Practical .Net for Financial Markets. I ordered this book after reading my colleague Ted's glowing review of the book on Amazon. I have to admit that, for me, the book was a bit on the disappointing side. The book has a little bit of everything ... a simple crossing engine, some messaging (designed to illustrate how STP works), some encryption, some good example of networking, etc.
However, what seems to be missing from the marketplace is a great book that deals with the entire spectrum of financial instruments from a developer's point of view. Something that will not only discuss the business domain and underlying technology, but will also point to real products that implement the various systems. A deep dive for the developer to become completly immersed in Wall Street systems.
For example, let's take Equities. From a systems standpoint, I want to know what goes on from the time that a trade is entered until someone receives confirmation through snailmail. I want to know what an order entry system does, how trades are routed to the exchanges, how FIX messaging is used, how crossing engines and auto-execution engines work, how stat arb and algorithmic trading factors in, how market-making functions, how settlment is done, how positions are maintained and how P&L are calculated, how market data gets into a system, how risk is calculated, etc. I want to know how systems and vendors like Bloomberg, Fidessa, Reuters, Wombat, Vhayu, etc fit into this space.
In addition, I would like to see topics that are tangental in nature, but geared towards the financial systems developer. How to develop low-latency systems. How to write UI's with fast-updating grids of market data. How to use complex event processing to implement stat arb trading. How to do order routing efficiently using rules engines.
I want a complete end-to-end picture. I want FinancialSystemsPedia.
My former colleague Matt was thinking about writing this kind of book several years ago. I think that there is a real need for this kind of knowledge to be put on paper.
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Good Luck to Matt Devlin
One of our favorite poachers, Matt Devlin, has just left Finetix to strike out on his own.
Good luck Matt (but stay away from my team!). Poaching is one of the toughest jobs on The Street, especially when it is so close to bonus season.
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Good luck Matt (but stay away from my team!). Poaching is one of the toughest jobs on The Street, especially when it is so close to bonus season.
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Shortage of Indian Engineers
From today's New York Times:
As its technology companies soar to the outsourcing skies, India is bumping up against an improbable challenge. In a country once regarded as a bottomless well of low-cost, ready-to-work, English-speaking engineers, a shortage looms.
India still produces plenty of engineers, nearly 400,000 a year at last count. But their competence has become the issue.
...found only one in four engineering graduates to be employable. The rest were deficient in the required technical skills, fluency in English or ability to work in a team or deliver basic oral presentations.
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
As its technology companies soar to the outsourcing skies, India is bumping up against an improbable challenge. In a country once regarded as a bottomless well of low-cost, ready-to-work, English-speaking engineers, a shortage looms.
India still produces plenty of engineers, nearly 400,000 a year at last count. But their competence has become the issue.
...found only one in four engineering graduates to be employable. The rest were deficient in the required technical skills, fluency in English or ability to work in a team or deliver basic oral presentations.
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Monday, October 16, 2006
.NET/C# Trading System
Amazing Aeronautical Charts Site
http://skyvector.com/
If you are a real pilot or a virtual one, then this is the site you want to go to in order to see charts.
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
If you are a real pilot or a virtual one, then this is the site you want to go to in order to see charts.
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Sunday, October 15, 2006
Wall Street meets Hollywood
From the New York Times article here.
Hedge funds and Wall Street investment banks are plowing money into Hollywood films, paying producers like Joel Silver and Ivan Reitman to produce hits.
I guess that we have to write a market data source that monitors the turnstiles of each of the movies that we invest in. Craig, can you come up with a feed handler in a week?
(I wonder how we will hedge this .... Long Ivan Reitman and short Delta House?)
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Hedge funds and Wall Street investment banks are plowing money into Hollywood films, paying producers like Joel Silver and Ivan Reitman to produce hits.
I guess that we have to write a market data source that monitors the turnstiles of each of the movies that we invest in. Craig, can you come up with a feed handler in a week?
(I wonder how we will hedge this .... Long Ivan Reitman and short Delta House?)
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Wanted: Easy way to set multiple breakpoints in VS 2005
I am tracing through some legacy code where a certain class has about 20 different constructors. I would like some way where I can tell VS.NET 2005 to set a breakpoint on each of the constructors.
Likewise, given the name of a method, I would like a way to set a breakpoint at the entry to all of the variants of the method. For instance, if I have a method called GetValue(), and we have a large number of polymophic methods such as
void GetValue(ref bool b)
void GetValue(ref int i)
void GetValue(ref double d)
void GetValue(ref string s)
there should be a way to set a breakpoint at the entry point to each one the GetValue() methods with one one right-click of the mouse.
Sounds like a possible enhancement for Resharper? Or maybe, someone has written a VS macro to do this?
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Likewise, given the name of a method, I would like a way to set a breakpoint at the entry to all of the variants of the method. For instance, if I have a method called GetValue(), and we have a large number of polymophic methods such as
void GetValue(ref bool b)
void GetValue(ref int i)
void GetValue(ref double d)
void GetValue(ref string s)
there should be a way to set a breakpoint at the entry point to each one the GetValue() methods with one one right-click of the mouse.
Sounds like a possible enhancement for Resharper? Or maybe, someone has written a VS macro to do this?
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Sunday, October 08, 2006
Fall Foliage
I flew up to Bennington, Vermont yesterday. The fall foliage is absolutely magnificent. There is no place in the United States like Vermont.
It's about a 1-1/4 hour flight from Morristown (MMU) Airport to Stephen Morse Airport in Bennington. Fly over the Catskills to Albany, then make a right turn at the 083 radial of the Albany VOR. It's about another 10 minutes.
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Saturday, October 07, 2006
What are you doing with your MFC Apps?
An awful lot of IBs still have a lot of front ends written in Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC).
1) Are you considering MFC to be an end-of-life product?
2) What are your plans for migrating the front ends to other frameworks? Are you going to .NET/C#, .NET/C++, or Java?
3) How will you be doing the migration? Are you devoting a year's worth of time to rewritting the app from scratch? And, while you are doing that, will you be refactoring all of the business logic that you wished that you ha not embedded in the GUI into a new middle tier?
4) Are you going straight for Vista/WPF for your rewrite?
5) Do you wish that Microsoft had a strategy for upgrading your massive MFC codebase to .NET?
Update: John responds here
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
1) Are you considering MFC to be an end-of-life product?
2) What are your plans for migrating the front ends to other frameworks? Are you going to .NET/C#, .NET/C++, or Java?
3) How will you be doing the migration? Are you devoting a year's worth of time to rewritting the app from scratch? And, while you are doing that, will you be refactoring all of the business logic that you wished that you ha not embedded in the GUI into a new middle tier?
4) Are you going straight for Vista/WPF for your rewrite?
5) Do you wish that Microsoft had a strategy for upgrading your massive MFC codebase to .NET?
Update: John responds here
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Microsoft ESB News
http://www.intelligententerprise.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=193104592
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Thursday, October 05, 2006
Sungard's Grid for Analytics
It was brought to my attention today that Sungard has Adaptiv Analytics, a calculation framework that is grid enabled. The marketing literature says that it has pricing and risk simulations right out of the box.
What might be attractive about this is :
1) Sungard has a long history of dealing with financial companies
2) The product seems to be tuned for a specific vertical industry and a specific purpose .... to speed up pricing and risk.
3) They claim to be based totally on .NET !!!!!!!!!!
Anybody using this thing yet? Wonder what the other grid vendors have to say about this?
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
What might be attractive about this is :
1) Sungard has a long history of dealing with financial companies
2) The product seems to be tuned for a specific vertical industry and a specific purpose .... to speed up pricing and risk.
3) They claim to be based totally on .NET !!!!!!!!!!
Anybody using this thing yet? Wonder what the other grid vendors have to say about this?
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Thanks, Mark Pollack
The co-head of the Spring.Net consortium gave very generously of his time and gave a 2-hour lecture on Spring to my company. There are interesting things coming down the pike for Spring.Net, especially along the areas of messaging.
An ex-colleague of mine was developing a GUI framework for Spring.Net, but now that he is gainfully employed by a major IB, I wonder what will become of that effort. I thought that it could give CAB some real competition. Matt is also delving deep into the CAB world. Wonder if he will take over the framework.
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
An ex-colleague of mine was developing a GUI framework for Spring.Net, but now that he is gainfully employed by a major IB, I wonder what will become of that effort. I thought that it could give CAB some real competition. Matt is also delving deep into the CAB world. Wonder if he will take over the framework.
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Monday, October 02, 2006
Newest Joshi Paper
Thanks to Mark Joshi for pointing out that he has an updated version of his paper on "A Day in the Life of a Quant".
http://www.markjoshi.com/downloads/advice.pdf
Now maybe I'll be able to talk to Ryan! (Inside joke)
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
http://www.markjoshi.com/downloads/advice.pdf
Now maybe I'll be able to talk to Ryan! (Inside joke)
©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
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