Comments Added and WMI Blues

I spaced out on approving and publishing the moderated comments (thanks Craig). So now, there are about 30 commnents, dating back from late May.

I was wondering why nobody congratulated me on my new job :-)

Starting to play around with Microsoft's WMI for instrumenting applications. I need to beat up on Microsoft for not letting you author .NET-based WMI providers that allow method invocation and property setters. All you can do with .NET WMI providers are receive events and do property gets. You cannot change a value through a property setting, nor can you manage an application by calling a method on a provider.

Seems that if you want to write a fully-functional WMI provider, then you have to drop down to COM (even using ATL) and C++.

This limitation is severe. This means that I cannot write a .NET app that can be managed by a .NET provider. This means that, if I want to write a monitoring and management dashboard (for monitoring, let's say, a .NET-based trading system), I have to drag out my old COM/ATL books and write unmanaged code. Ugh!

It seems as if plenty of people on the newsgroups share my pain.

©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

Silicon on Wall Street (followup)

As a response to my previous posting, my man John weighs in with some words on FPGA's on Wall Street.

As an aside, I notice that there are some good blogs on issues that Wall Street technologists come across every day... John, Chris, DLG, JO'S, and the daddy of them all, Matt. Know of any others?


©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

Exotics Computations on Silicon?

Someone floated an idea that sounded interesting ...

Has anyone heard of writing their calc functions in C, and burning them onto field programmable gate arrays? The calc models would have to be fairly static, but it might be able to give you magnitudes of speed improvements.

I confess that I know very little about this technology, but it bears some investigation.

Hopefully J.O'S can weigh in with something on his blog....

Here is an interesting article.

©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

Barrier Options

Barrier Options are considered to be exotic derivatives. Exotics usually take a long time to price, and if you are architecting a trading system, you usually want to put a lot of computing power behind the calculations of exotics. Many trading firms look to Compute Grids and data caches to help speed up some of these calculations.

This explanation of Barrier Options has been taken from the Bank of New York website:

SRDF

SRDF is an EMC product family that provides synchronous or async data replication between LUs (logical disk units) of two SAN (Storage Area Networks).

Here is a story about how data replication saved the day in a trading environment at a Tier-1 bank.

Here is a description of a high-performance trading system that uses SRDF. The brochure contains some good points to consider when designing the infrastructure of a trading system. These kinds of infrastructure components were things that I never had to consider previously when I was concentrating solely on writing good software and managing development teams, but in the architecture group, I have to pay attention to this stuff now.



©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

The First Week and Many New Terms

Sitting here relaxing on the couch after the 2nd day of a grueling offsite. Switching the TV between the Yankee game and the MSG network showing old WWWF highlights from Madison Square Garden (yes, I used to be a major WWWF fan when I was a kid). Perfect TV for unwinding.

It's strange being on the other side of the full-time/employee equation. Being part of the Equities Architecture team, you have various vendors trying to get a piece of your ear. There is no better PR than having your product as piece of a major equities trading system. As such, I am wondering why Microsoft never devoted major effort to attacking the trading system space. Microsoft would be a major force if they came out with the infrastructure to do low-latency, high-volume market data distribution, pub/sub messaging, ultra-fast UI grids, the ability to take an Excel model and compile it into a DLL, etc. Microsoft always seems to be on the cusp on doing something in the trading system space, but has never come through with a compelling, end-to-end story. However, new technologies like Windows Compute Cluster and Excel Services seem to be moving the company in the right direction from a technological standpoint. Plus, their recent announcement to invade the healthcare space has shown a new willingness to attack certain verticals. It still is an uphill battle to sell Microsoft within Capital Markets for anything but UI work ... but people are starting to listen!

I always have a page in the back of my notebook where I write down terms that I need to explore more. Being a .NET specialist and an architecture generalist, I am bound to come up against unfamiliararities. Here are terms from the 2-day offsite that I attended:

1) Barrier Knockout
2) Bishop Algorithm
3) Monte Carlo Trials
4) SSH
5) Alpha Partition
6) MPI (a grid network API)
7) SRDF
8) SANs and Spindle Optimization with regards to Databases
9) Multicast Storms
10) Java NIO, especially with regards to memory-mapped files

By the way, anyone know of a .NET/C# port of NIO?


©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

Event Stream Processing

Marco blogs about Event Stream Processing (ESP) at http://rulecore.com/espblog/. There is also a Wikipedia article about it.

ESP is especially interesting in the financial markets, where you want to perform real-time decision making on a stream of quotes coming from your market data distribution infrastructure. ESP gives you opportunities for things like algorithmic trading and real-time risk management.

Companies in this space include Gemstone (Gemfire), KX (KDB+), Vhayu, Streambase, Aleri. I would like to see Microsoft get into this space with a future version of SQL Server. (Since I have some meetings coming up with some people from Microsoft, I will be sure to ask this question.)

I will definitely be exploring this space in the near future.

©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

Conflation

The word conflation sounds like a condition that requires you to take a few spoonfuls of Pepto Bizmol. But, it is a term that is used when discussion efficient market data distribution.

The technique has been around for a while. I have always referred to it as aggregation. The term conflation means the combining of data in messages to form one message. You use conflation of messages to overcome slow consumers, limited message queues, and any situation where a message publisher has to throttle the outgoing stream of messages.

Let's say that you are a consumer of stock quotes. The market data distributor receives 1000 quotes for MSFT in one second, but you are only interested in the latest price every second. So, the market data distributor will conflate all of the MSFT quote messages into a single message that gets broadcast to you every second. This means that the server will only send you the last bid/ask price.

You can choose various parameters for the conflation. For instance, as mentioned above, you might want time-based conflation (every 2 seconds, every 30 seconds, etc), you may want conflation based on the size of your message queue, or you might choose your own custom way of doing conflation.


©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

Consulting Firms - What Should We Charge?

(This was a post on my blog from a few months ago that I took down. The numbers in this post were arrived at during the course of one train ride from New Jersey to NYC, and in no way are derived from any real consulting firm. These are numbers that should be considered if you are going to start your own IT consulting firm. I also included some of the comments that the original post garnered.)

Consulting Firms - What Should We Charge?

On another blog, a person who is in charge of some consulting dollars (or pounds) at his company questioned why they should pay $X to one consulting company when some temp contractors could do it for $0.5X.

That got me thinking (yet again) about how much high-end consultancies should charge a client per hour or per professional day. I came up with some numbers that I would like to share.

Before I start, some things I want to mention:1) Please feel free to comment in case my numbers are way off base.2) The numbers have no connection whatsoever with Finetix, my former employer. These numbers were arrived at by opening up a random number of fortune cookies and summing up the lottery numbers. 3) These figures are for the US marketplace. I have no idea what the British equivalents to Social Security Tax and 401K plans are.

Fixed Costs Per Employee
------------------------
1) Salary
We want to have a consultancy that has top technical people who have some amount of financial background. We are looking for .NET and Java experts who have done some work on Wall Street in the past, and who can at least tell me what a bond is. In a previous blog posting, I mentioned that the current base salary on Wall Street for this level is about $150,000.

2) 401K/retirement Plan
Let's say that you have a 3% 401K. That adds another $5000.

3) Bonus
Always a tricky thing. Let's take $10,000 for a job well done.

4) Insurance
We pay 2/3 of an employees medical and dental insurance. This amount to about $7000 per year. We also have to pay some other taxes, such an unemployment insurance, etc.

5) Social Security tax
We pay about 7.15 of the person's first $90,000 in income. This is about $6000.

Subtotal - We are paying about $178,000 in salary and benefits per employee.

Costs of Running the Business
-----------------------------

1) Back office staff to support 40 delivery people. We need about 10 people. There are 3 partners, director of Human Resources, director of Benefits, director of Recruiting, two salespeople, director of marketing, plus administrative assistant. If we wanted to chop some dollars, we could probably combine the HR and Benefits. Some of the people are paid totally on commission, some partly, and some are strictly salaried. The partners pay themselves a fixed base salary. So, I am going to put this roughly at $1M.

2) Rent
Nice offices in New York, satellite offices in various locations. Also, cost of utilities, cleaning services, a nice tip for the elevator operators and cleaning people, etc. Let's estimate $400,000.

3) Office Supplies, Furniture, Postage, ISP, etc.
Let's say $100,000.

4) Other items:
- Interest on the Float. The "float' is the number of days between the time you pay your employees and the time you finally collect money from the client.
- Client "incentives" - that nasty, unspoken cost of doing business.
- Marketing Budget
- Conferences and professional organizations

5) Corporate Taxes!!!!

Subtotal - Let's guess about $2M. If we have 40 consultants generating revenue, this is about $50,000 per consultant.

So, now we have the cost per consultant at around $230,000 per year. There are about 230 possible consulting days per year (365 days - 104 weekends - 15 vacation - 10 holidays plus some sick days). This means, if the consultant was billing for all 230 days, we would have to charge the client $1000 per day just to break even. Now, let's say that each consultant is allowed about 10 days of bench time per year. This brings our daily rate up to about $1100.How much profit margin should the partners have? From dealing with various headhunters, I would assume a good profit margin to be about 25-30%. This means that we should be charging a client about $1400 for a consultant.

Our consulting company has a mixture of various skill levels. Some people are more junior than others. So, we create a rate card that goes from $1200 per day for a junior person, to $1600 per day for a senior person. This comes out to $150 to $200 per hour.

Now, at that rate, we are relatively cheap compared to other consulting companies. Microsoft Consulting charges at least $2000 per day. IBM and BearingPoint charge at least $250 per hour for a junior consultant, up to about $450 an hour for a director.

Who are our customers? Certainly, the tier 1 and tier 2 financial institutions. Pharma companies are not going to pay these rates. We are looking to deal with clients who can appreciate our talent pool and who can afford to pay.

Wanna start your own consultancy? These are the numbers that you will have to deal with.


8 Comments:
· I think you're a little on the low side. My former employer charged $250 to $320 per hour, and we had pharmas and other corporates in our clientelle.In yours costs, perhaps factor in some free consulting time to fix screw-ups, late deliveries, etc.What about training? If you want to justify your rate you need highly trained, up to date employees. This is why I left, my employer made no investment in me. I had to train myself on my time, which left me often working around the clock.10 days on the bench per year! Man, I do NOT miss consulting!
By Burnt Out, at 5:38 PM

· Wouldn't the partners take a % of the profits rather than a salary?What about training, free days to clients, sick days?Why isn't the employees bonus based on a % of the profits the company makes?Based on your calculations the is a backoffice person for every 4 consultants? I hate to see the size of the backoffice for 1000 consultantsWhy don't I offshore some of my the work?Can't your consultancy do fixed price?
By Anonymous, at 6:30 PM

· Wouldn't the partners take a % of the profits rather than a salary?Possibly. Depends on how risk-averse the partners were. If I was a partner, I would pay myself a low salary ($100K) and then at the end of the year, divvy up the profits.What about training, free days to clients, sick days?I mentioned 5 sick days in my original post. Training is nice, and I would like to give at least a week of training, so that can be done during the 10 days of bench time. OK, let's add in about $100K for training. Free days to clients? Never heard of this!Why isn't the employees bonus based on a % of the profits the company makes?Because many smart people will negotiate a guaranteed fixed bonus when they join, especially since the debacles of 2002 and 2003. But I might give an added "incentive" bonus to some of my best performers at the end of the year. OK, let's add another 100K.Based on your calculations the is a backoffice person for every 4 consultants? I hate to see the size of the backoffice for 1000 consultants10 people should be a constant. Even when your company grows to 100 people. In fact, at the start, I might consider consolidating the benefits and HR functions, and make the partners do more marketing. So, we can cut our staff back to 8.Why don't I offshore some of my the work?Never, never! This is what distinguishes my shop from other larger ones. Strictly all client-facing work.Can't your consultancy do fixed price?I abhor fixed-price contracts. We could do it, but perhaps under duress!One thing that I forgot to mention was finder’s fees. If I hire a person through an employment agency, then I have to pay then 15-30% of the employee's first year salary. That's a significant chunk. Let's assume $30,000 for 10 people, and that's another $300,000.So, we have added another $500,000 in costs to our model. That's about $10K per employee. Gotta bump up the rate card by $50 per day. So, our rate card is now $1250 through $1650. And, coincidentally, $1650 per day is what a lot of the top-tier banks pay for senior technical people.

©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

The Start of a New Adventure

On the eve of starting a great, new, exciting position, I would like to recap my experiences over the past 4 weeks in searching for a new job. One of the motivating factors in looking for a new job was that I wanted to have an important role in shaping the development and architecture of a major financial system, and do so at a senior level. Being a hands-on coder was OK for me on a part-time basis, but I wanted to manage and mentor developers who would be doing most of the coding while devoting more of my time to learning about new technologies in the financial arena, meeting with vendors, sitting on enterprise architecture committees, etc.

It’s always good to have some throwaway interviews, especially if you have not interviewed in quite a while. As soon as I announced my intentions of moving on to something different, I received a number of calls for interviews. I knew that some of the positions were not right for me, but I needed to get some spit and polish on my interviewing style before going out to the big boys.

The first interview was for a consulting company that claimed to do some financial work, but whose main focus was content management. Nevertheless, I needed to meet with people, so I went down for the interviews. The company had a “boiler room” full of cold-callers, something that makes my blood curdle. I met with the “HR lady” and then (believe it or not), the Head of Business Development. What kind of company would have you meet with their head salesperson? After my ideas about how a consulting company should be run went right over the salesguy’s head, I met with one of the partners. He was more perceptive, in that when I told him that I did not want to work for a consulting company that had the singleton, bodyshopping model, I could detect the dark cloud passing over his face and his immediate desire to end the interview as soon as possible.

The next day was another throwaway. A hedge fund had been after me for a few months. The headhunter told me that, as part of the job spec, the hedge fund requested that candidates live in New York City so that they could be on constant call. 14 hour days were the minimum. Joking with the headhunter, I told him that if I were to work 14 hour days, that I would want my current salary * 1.75 as a base. He called me back a week later and said that the hedge fund still wanted to talk to me. After an initial phone interview, I went down to see the people from the hedge fund. The fund is technically astute; they were developing totally in .NET 2.0, although they were doing all ASP.NET apps. The only thing that the first two interviewers, both developers, did was to repeatedly thumb through my resume, and exclaim that I had done a lot of stuff. Finally, I interviewed with the CTO. We talked about a lot of conceptual things, and he asked me one SQL question, which I got about half right. (I happen to have a mental block when it comes to writing SQL during an interview – give me SQL Query Analyzer, and I can work up the answer in 5 minutes). When the CTO asked me about my compensation requirements, I told him that I thought that the recruiter communicated that to him already. The recruiter never did, and when I mentioned the figure to him, he rolled onto the floor laughing. We ended the interview about 8PM, and he told me that his day was just beginning.

Two interviews without a good tech question.

The next interview was with another, very small hedge fund. The CTO was a really nice guy, except that I wanted his job! The pay was terrible. About 60% of my current base, although a 30-40% bonus was typical. To his credit, the CTO knew that he could not support my compensation level, and we both knew that it would have been a mismatch if I had joined.

Still no tech questions.

Later that day, I went down for a face-to-face with a very small company that specialized in financial tools. I had actually spoken briefly to this company a few months ago, but they really wanted a GUI developer who specialized in C++. Seeking a good throwaway interview with some good, hard tech questions, I contacted this company again to see if the position was open. It was! I had an initial one-hour phone conversation with their senior developer, and then was invited down to their offices for a second round. The questions I was asked included:

- Design the architecture and the API for a logging mechanism
- Implement a breadth-first and depth-first search for a tree.
- Design a hash table.
- Implement a workflow manager.
When the CEO of the company walked in to interview me, I almost fainted. The CEO looked like he was 12 years old. (He is actually a MIT grad.) I felt like I was interviewing my son. OK, I think that we both realized at that point that there was a slight cultural difference!

A phone interview with one of the big IBs followed. The job spec was for a C# developer for an Order Management System, but the recruiter kept insisting that it was a Managing Director’s position. I told the recruiter specifically that I did not want an Associate Director or Director position at this company, but she kept changing her story with regards to the title. The phone interview was a non-event. No tech questions; just a manager going over my past projects and asking me where I wanted to be five years from now. A very, very dry interview.

Then came two wonderful interviews with two different groups at an IB, one for consulting and one for full-time. I got offers from both these interviews. More on this later. I was asked to design a crossing engine. I was asked about the .NET garbage collector. I was asked to draw an architecture for a trading system. I was asked about bottlenecks in the system.

I got verbal offers from both of these groups the next day.

I knew that I was going to take one of these two positions, but I went on two other interviews as backups. One was with a big ad agency who needed rearchitecture of some big websites. Nice company located in the hinterlands of New Jersey, and they came through with a very nice consulting offer at a pretty good rate. It would have been a good change of pace, and I would have taken it if the other offers did not come through. Another interview was a phone talk with the head dev and the manager of a group at another IB. Their systems were in a mess, and they needed rearchitecture and new development on their big Private Banking systems. Not really a position that I wanted. Both of these interviews contained no tech questions.

One other background conversation was with a small company that specialized in software and consulting services for hedge funds. Really nice guys, and would have been great if I had wanted to bill by the hour and customize software for individual funds, but they were looking at me to take over the CTO role. Unfortunately, they did not have a sufficient revenue stream to support non-client-billable activities, and sadly, it would have been more of singleton consulting.

In the course of interviewing, I met some very good recruiters who I will be sure to use in my new position when I need staff. I also met some very, very bad recruiters who a) did not communicate salary requirements to their clients, b) did not give me feedback, c) lied about the titles of the positions. Among the goodies I met were Matt of SH and Drew of CMA. Cheers guys!

I was disappointed in the level of tech questions that I received, and was surprised that most of the interviewers would just spend time gawking at my resume. They were actually embarrassed to ask me the generic tech questions (ie: what is a virtual function, what is a delegate, etc). However, the design-a-system questions were good, and I have to remember to use some of them, especially the one about designing a workflow engine.

My new position is a senior-level position at one of the IBs. I will be in charge of architecting some new trading systems and rearchitecting some older ones. I will have a small staff of good people. My manager is a very dynamic personality, and I am hoping that we can move this organization forward in terms of trading technology. I will be involved in new technologies (to me, at least), and will be investigating low-latency market data distribution, algorithmic trading, universal GUIs (my Wall Street Stack), and more.

©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

Testing, Testing

Anyone out there still?

Important announcement coming soon....

©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

Next Move

I am in the market for new opportunities. My interests are hedge funds, trading technology, .NET.

If you have something interesting going on, please email me at magmasystems@yahoo.com

I am going to take a few weeks off, investigate technologies that I have been too busy to investigate, and watch the rest of the World Cup.

©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

Things to Learn

Going through some of the reading from SIA. Tons and tons of stuff out there. On my "to-learn" list are:

MDDL - market data definition language, yet another XML-based way of transmitting financial info

Gigaspaces - grid-based infrastructure

Vhayu - real-time and historical data storage with real-time calculations and event broadcasting

Wombat - another high-speed market data and messaging platform

©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

Another Interesting Job Posting

http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/sof/173118487.html

They are located on the 4th floor of a building on Franklin Street, which is in the area of New York City called TriBeCa. In the old days, Franklin Street had many spacious lofts ... which got me thinking back to the days where a lot of young software companies worked out of lofts or apartments. In fact, in 1986, I worked for a young startup called Multex. There were 3 or 4 of us sitting in an apartment on West 53rd Street, coding apps for Goldman Sachs. Multex went on to expand, go public, and get bought out by Reuters.

Former Multex employee Brett Schlussman left just after me, and formed NetLogic with another former Multex guy (Michael St. Hippolyte) and a developer from Bankers Trust. They worked out of Brett's apartment in the 20's, taking Brett's Windows-based 3270 emulator that he developed for First Boston and selling it to Eicon.

We have interviewed a number of ex-Multex employees recently at Finetix. These were people who joined Multex after the Reuters merger. They had no idea that they were being interviewed by Multex employee number 5.

©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

SIA Technology Show 2006

I stopped by the Securities Industry Association show at lunchtime today. Walked around the exhibit hall and saw 1000 different instances of "the Wall Street Stack". Ow .... my head hurt from thinking about how many times the same stack has been rewritten in different ways for the sole purpose of displaying real-time charts and blotters. If you were a financial software company, how much would you pay for a completely operational version of The Stack?

Picked up a least 50 magazines, newsletters, and newspapers on trading technologies (hardly anyone was giving out T-Shirts this year -- I am a real T-Shirt collector). Waters Magazine still seems to be the best one out there for hard-core Wall Street developers.

There was a nice article on pages 21 and 22 of the Summer 2006 issue of Windows in Financial Services on a framework that I helped architect at Wachovia last year. The framework is what they now call OneSource. Several apps in Wachovia are based on OneSource, and I am happy to report that the ClientNet application that I worked on last year is being rolled out worldwide at Wachovia. One of the mags had a nice bit on the adoption of grid technololgies within Wachovia --- my man R.O. rolled that stuff out.

Larry from Finetix gave a nice talk on Quality Assurance in Capital Markets. Hopefully, some past and current clients attended that one! Larry is one of the best in the business.

Fourth of July coming up .... we have to get ourselves out to Block Island


©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

Derman is in the House

Famed quant Emanuel Derman is blogging.

http://www.wilmott.com/blogs/eman/index.cfm

I just started reading his book My Life as a Quant. Interesting to read his experiences at Bell Labs at the start of the whole Unix/C movement in the late 1970's.

I will definitely have some more comments as I read through the book.

©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

Interesting Way to Recruit People

http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/sof/168208451.html

©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

YABGT (Yet Another Bill Gates Tribute)

I will join all of the other bloggers out there and put in my two cents about Bill Gates.

I had my first and only brush with Gates back in 1991 or 1992. I was a contributing editor for Microsoft Systems Journal back in the old days. One day, I get a call from my editor. He tells me that Bill Gates is stopping in New York for a night, on his way back to Seattle from a European trip. He wanted to have dinner with the MSJ contributing editors to tell them about some exciting stuff in the industry. Would I be interested?

We all met at a Japanese hotel on Park Ave at 32nd St. This hotel had a beautiful restaurant, and Gates, being a sushi fanatic, reserved a tatani room for us.

We all get there at 8PM, and then in walks Gates, followed by his flack, Jon Lazarus (who used to be the publisher of MSJ). In attendance was myself, Ross Greenburg (author of RamNet, and later, some virus-checking program), Greg Comeau (author of Comeau C++), Charles Petzold (author of a book), and Tony Rizzo (my editor).

Gates turned out to be a great guy, despite the constant leg movements under the table. Very personable. He spent most of the night talking about getting Dave Cutler from DEC, and the new operating system he was working on (Windows NT). Every word was preceeded by a stern warning from Lazarus never to repeat what was said.

Of course, the very next week, PC Week featured a big story on Cutler and NT!!!

©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

Never thought they could beat Spiderman!

http://www.derivativesstrategy.com/magazine/comix/

©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

Housing Price Futures

I heard about this on NPR radio the other day ... A great way of hedging a housing market. If you are buying now, and are afraid that the housing market might fall through the floor in your town, then you can short the housing future. If you think that your area might see an uptick in housing, then long the future.


(from a CBS Marketwatch article)

The Chicago Merc introduced cash-settled futures and options based on housing markets in Boston, Chicago, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Diego, San Francisco and Washington, as well as a weighted composite index.

The contracts are priced by multiplying the index value by $250; the average contract size for the various cities is roughly $55,000, although they vary by region, according to Sayee Srinivasan, associate director of research and product development at the CME. He said the exchange is considering adding contracts for other booming real-estate markets such as Phoenix and Orlando.

"The futures markets like volatility, so the contracts based on the most volatile housing markets might see the most volume," Srinivasan said.

For each region, there are four contracts, which expire on a quarterly basis, so there are currently contracts for August 2006, November 2006, February 2007 and May 2007.

Although the contracts have only been trading for a very short period, most of the interest is looking further out on the curve with the May 2007 contracts getting the most action initially, said Fritz Siebel, senior broker at Traditional Financial Services Inc.

There could be demand for longer-dated contracts, something the CME is considering if the existing contracts prove popular enough.

Siebel noted the early interest has been in derivatives based on hot West Coast markets in San Diego, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and also Miami on the East Coast.


©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved