Siri in Capital Markets

My wife has been having all sorts of fun with her new iPhone 4s, constantly testing the NLP capabilities of the Siri servers. If you ask Siri "What is 2 plus 2", she (yes, Siri is my new daughter!) won't speak the answer, but she will show you the appropriate page in Wolfram Alpha.

I don't know if Siri will ever be used for trading. With any mobile platform, the main worries are connectivity and security. There have been reports about security gaps within the 4s, especially where Siri is concerned.

But, the Siri platform, combined with Wolfram Alpha, can be the starting point for powerful, on-the-fly analytics. Combine this with an alerting platform, and you can begin to see the possibilities for Capital Markets.

Apple needs to open up the Siri platform for integration with 3rd party apps. I can imagine someone entering a simple command like "Siri, tell me when IBM trades past its 52-week high" or something more complex like "Siri, tell me when people are rotating into the Utilities sector". This kind of custom semantic processing has been around for a while, but it's crucial that Apple opens up an API for Siri that is available to iOS developers.

Another thought - If Siri integration will only be available through a Cocoa API, does that mean that people will move away from developing HTML5 apps for the iPhone? Or will technologies like PhoneGap be more popular?



©2011 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved. All opinions here are personal, and have no relation to my employer.

One of the Best and Simplest Explanations of HFT

Here

Looks like BAC has replaced C as the high-frequency trade of choice.


©2011 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved. All opinions here are personal, and have no relation to my employer.

Free Visualization Controls for Silverlight

From the Microsoft Research site:

Dynamic Data Display adds interactive visualization of dynamic data to your Silverlight application. The download contains a set of UI controls for creating line graphs, bubble charts, heat maps, and other complex 2-D plots. 

The heat map part looks most interesting.


©2011 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved. All opinions here are personal, and have no relation to my employer.

Interesting Topic at STAC Research Conference in New York on Nov 2nd

I am not going to be in New York that day, but STAC has a few topics of interest at their upcoming conference on November 2nd.

"Hadoop for Trading Firms: Beyond the Science Project," by Jack Norris, VP Marketing, MapR


“Standard Technology Benchmarks for Market Risk Platforms,” by Lars Ericson, Director, Citi


It's nice to see someone from Citi presenting :-) Wish they had more people from the client side of things presenting.


©2011 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved. All opinions here are personal, and have no relation to my employer.

Windows 8 Registered I/O Networking Extensions

From Len

The Registered I/O Networking Extensions, RIO, is a new API that has been added to Winsock to support high-speed networking for increased networking performance with lower latency and jitter. These extensions are targeted primarily for server applications and use pre-registered data buffers and completion queues to increase performance.

Is Microsoft moving towards the day where people will consider them for a HFT stack?


©2011 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved. All opinions here are personal, and have no relation to my employer.

Raptor - Real-Time Analytics on Hadoop

I am starting to get interested in what Hadoop and "Big Data" can do for capital markets. This talk at the upcoming Hadoop World in NYC looks pretty interesting, especially the part about predictive trading.


Raptor combines Hadoop & HBase with machine learning models for adaptive data segmentation, partitioning, bucketing, and filtering to enable ad-hoc queries and real-time analytics.
Raptor has intelligent optimization algorithms that switch query execution between HBase and MapReduce. Raptor can create per-block dynamic bloom filters for adaptive filtering. A policy manager allows optimized indexing and autosharding.

This session will address how Raptor has been used in prototype systems in predictive trading, times-series analytics, smart customer care solutions, and a generalized analytics solution that can be hosted on the cloud.

If anyone attends this talk, please feel free to post a comment here and let me know how it went. Hopefully, there will be some slides up on SlideShare afterwards.


©2011 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved. All opinions here are personal, and have no relation to my employer.

.NET Parallelism and a Worthy Cause

A fascinating case study is available from Microsoft on how Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) greatly reduced the time (and cost) to analyze the results from a colonoscopy. For men over 50, a colonoscopy is practically mandatory, and the process is somewhat disruptive and uncomfortable. The use of parallelism has reduced the analysis time by many orders of magnitude, and has made the concept of "virtual colonoscopies" even more real.

Microsoft had pushed MGH to port its code to C#, but for a variety of reasons, this was impossible. I wonder if there would have been even more magnitude of improvements if the code was ported.

Bringing this to capital markets, companies might find that their real-time pricing and risk (and stress tests) might benefit from a rearchitecture to the .NET/C#/TPL stack.


©2011 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved. All opinions here are personal, and have no relation to my employer.