Last week, I was about to finalize my transfer to the Derivatives Analytics desk when an amazing opportunity was offered to me by my company. I cannot blog too much about this new opportunity other to say that it involves Complex Event Processing and transformational new directions for trading and decision making in Equities. This is a huge initiative for my company, is being sponsored by the top people on the business side in Equities, and goes all the way up to the CEO of the company. I will be leading this new project on the technical end, and I am working with one of the movers-and-shakers on the business end.
This is not the standard algorithmic trading scenario that is the standard use case for vendors like Apama, Skyler, etc. We will be pushing the limits of the CEP and messaging vendors. We have the mandate to have all of our Equities systems interact with our. And, if everything goes right, it will transform the way that systems are written within our company.
The nice thing is that the Business is giving us several months of pure R&D time. Reading papers, attending conferences, meeting vendors, etc. For me, it is coming out of a silo and being given the opportunity to learn about every phase of our systems for trading equities. And, it will be building upon all of the things that I have been investigating for the past year in my Architecture role.
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Saturday, September 15, 2007
CEP and HPC Conferences
I will be stopping by the High Performance Computing on Wall Street conference on Monday, Sept 17, and catch up with the new Digipede release.
Wednesday through Friday, I will be at the Gartner Complex Event Processing conference in Orlando.
I am starting to feel like a vendor. However, in my new role, I am basically playing software entrepreneur again, this time in the context of a multi-billion company.
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Wednesday through Friday, I will be at the Gartner Complex Event Processing conference in Orlando.
I am starting to feel like a vendor. However, in my new role, I am basically playing software entrepreneur again, this time in the context of a multi-billion company.
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Thursday, September 06, 2007
.NET Winforms Expert Wanted
We would like to hire a true .NET/Winforms/C# expert (must be Winforms, not ASP.NET). A substantial part of the job would be to take over the .NET Client-side framework that Equities is using (ie: the thing I developed). You must be proficient in real-time front-ends, multithreading, understanding of messaging systems like Tibco EMS, etc.
You would be sitting in beautiful Warren, New Jersey, which is about 45 minutes west of New York City. However, you would have substantial opportunities to work with the business, which is located both in New York City and in Jersey City, NJ.
We would strongly prefer a full-time employee, although we might make an exception for an indie consultant.
This is an on-site job. So, please don't send me resumes from the Ukraine, asking if you can work remotely. Also, no calls from recruiters and consulting companies for now. I want to pick from people who are truly interested in financial services and .NET ... and these people probably read this blog already.
Since the position is in the Equities Advanced Architecture group, you must be a really strong communicator. If I ask you to get up to a whiteboard and explain something, I should be able to understand you without straining.
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
You would be sitting in beautiful Warren, New Jersey, which is about 45 minutes west of New York City. However, you would have substantial opportunities to work with the business, which is located both in New York City and in Jersey City, NJ.
We would strongly prefer a full-time employee, although we might make an exception for an indie consultant.
This is an on-site job. So, please don't send me resumes from the Ukraine, asking if you can work remotely. Also, no calls from recruiters and consulting companies for now. I want to pick from people who are truly interested in financial services and .NET ... and these people probably read this blog already.
Since the position is in the Equities Advanced Architecture group, you must be a really strong communicator. If I ask you to get up to a whiteboard and explain something, I should be able to understand you without straining.
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Friday, August 31, 2007
IBM and Limitless "Vacations"
Catch this while the NY Times still has it for free:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/31/nyregion/31vacation.html
Reminds me a little bit of myself ....
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/31/nyregion/31vacation.html
Reminds me a little bit of myself ....
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Bonus Paralysis
I have heard of a number of financial companies who are having a very difficult time hiring .NET developers, especially ones with WPF skills. The main problem with getting financial developers to move companies at this time of the year is Bonus Paralysis. Bonuses are typically announced in December and paid out in January, and nobody is going to sacrifice their bonuses at this time of the year to change companies .... unless ......
... there were little or no bonuses paid out. Because of the credit crisis, a number of news organizations have stated that bonuses this year will be drastically reduced. Everyone is now suitably warned and prepped to receive a significant decrease in last year's bonus (especially if you are in structured finance and credit derivs). And, at this time of the year, a new company would probably not guarantee your bonus.
If you are not expecting much of a bonus, would you stay around?
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
... there were little or no bonuses paid out. Because of the credit crisis, a number of news organizations have stated that bonuses this year will be drastically reduced. Everyone is now suitably warned and prepped to receive a significant decrease in last year's bonus (especially if you are in structured finance and credit derivs). And, at this time of the year, a new company would probably not guarantee your bonus.
If you are not expecting much of a bonus, would you stay around?
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
CEP Conference
There is a good chance that I will be at the first Gartner Summit on Complex Event Processing in Orlando, September 19-21.
I am especially interesting to see what Coral8 has to say. My interests are in using CEP for Business Activity Monitoring and Algorithmic Trading.
Matt and Chris have had some good things to say about Coral8 in the past, and if I had some time to breathe, I would like to download their SDK and start mucking around.
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
I am especially interesting to see what Coral8 has to say. My interests are in using CEP for Business Activity Monitoring and Algorithmic Trading.
Matt and Chris have had some good things to say about Coral8 in the past, and if I had some time to breathe, I would like to download their SDK and start mucking around.
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Working on the Trading Floor
A few weeks ago, Terry left a comment, asking what it was like to work on the trading floor.
I sit on a very large Equities trading floor that overlooks the Hudson River in lower Manhattan. Our particular area of the floor has the Derivatives Analytics group (my group) and Algorithmic Trading. The next row has the High Frequency Trading guys and some of the guys who control the high-speed market data systems.
Needless to say, the past few weks have been crazy. There is such an energy on the floor that, sometimes, everyone is our row just stops working in order to absorb the electricity. 15 minutes before the opening, things start humming. At the bell, it's chaos for about a half hour. People screaming out orders, groups of traders applauding and whooping when a trade turns out favorable. After 10, things really slow down until about 3PM.
Our group is composed of Quants. We trade our own positions, and we write software which enable us and other groups to trade. Almost all of our software is in C#/.NET 2.0, heavy use of generics and anonymous delegates.
The group is ethnically diverse. 4 Americans, 1 Brit, 3 Far-East Asians, and a couple of Russians for good measure (what's a good Quant group without the Russians!). 3 of the guys have PHDs, the rest have MS's. Actually, the head of the group does not have a Master's degree ... however, he got 3 Bachelor's degrees in 3 years at one of the top business schools in the world. Most of the group is fairly young. If you are in your early 30's, you are ancient. That makes me a pile of ash on the floor.
The group has its own framework. The framework is typical Russian mad scientist code. With this kind of code, it's never "A calls B". It's "A starts 5 threads, waits for completion signals, creates other objects via some dependency injection, does a few somersaults, and then calls B." But the framework is highly performant.
One of the things I am doing is writing some risk hedging apps using my own framework that my team developed for Equities. So, I am eating my own dogfood. I have not found any bugs in my stuff, but I have had to extend it a bit so that it cooperates with some of the stuff that Derivs Analytics have previously written (like Live Greek Servers).
As exciting as the trading floor is, I welcome the one or two days a week that I work from home. If I have to do really major thinking and design work, I cannot do it at work! It is hard to work at work. Luckily, a lot of Wall Street is starting to go to a model of allowing people to work from home part time. The three hours I save on commuting to NYC is time that I put into work. Now that my son is off at college, I don't have to worry about his heavy-metal bands coming into the house at 3:00 every afternoon to thrash around the basement.
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
I sit on a very large Equities trading floor that overlooks the Hudson River in lower Manhattan. Our particular area of the floor has the Derivatives Analytics group (my group) and Algorithmic Trading. The next row has the High Frequency Trading guys and some of the guys who control the high-speed market data systems.
Needless to say, the past few weks have been crazy. There is such an energy on the floor that, sometimes, everyone is our row just stops working in order to absorb the electricity. 15 minutes before the opening, things start humming. At the bell, it's chaos for about a half hour. People screaming out orders, groups of traders applauding and whooping when a trade turns out favorable. After 10, things really slow down until about 3PM.
Our group is composed of Quants. We trade our own positions, and we write software which enable us and other groups to trade. Almost all of our software is in C#/.NET 2.0, heavy use of generics and anonymous delegates.
The group is ethnically diverse. 4 Americans, 1 Brit, 3 Far-East Asians, and a couple of Russians for good measure (what's a good Quant group without the Russians!). 3 of the guys have PHDs, the rest have MS's. Actually, the head of the group does not have a Master's degree ... however, he got 3 Bachelor's degrees in 3 years at one of the top business schools in the world. Most of the group is fairly young. If you are in your early 30's, you are ancient. That makes me a pile of ash on the floor.
The group has its own framework. The framework is typical Russian mad scientist code. With this kind of code, it's never "A calls B". It's "A starts 5 threads, waits for completion signals, creates other objects via some dependency injection, does a few somersaults, and then calls B." But the framework is highly performant.
One of the things I am doing is writing some risk hedging apps using my own framework that my team developed for Equities. So, I am eating my own dogfood. I have not found any bugs in my stuff, but I have had to extend it a bit so that it cooperates with some of the stuff that Derivs Analytics have previously written (like Live Greek Servers).
As exciting as the trading floor is, I welcome the one or two days a week that I work from home. If I have to do really major thinking and design work, I cannot do it at work! It is hard to work at work. Luckily, a lot of Wall Street is starting to go to a model of allowing people to work from home part time. The three hours I save on commuting to NYC is time that I put into work. Now that my son is off at college, I don't have to worry about his heavy-metal bands coming into the house at 3:00 every afternoon to thrash around the basement.
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Random Musings
Yes, I know that I have not been blogging very actively this summer, but at the insistence of some colleagues and vendors who demand continuous entertainment, I will try to embark on another series of stream-of-conciousness postings.
Let's see what's new ....
1) London again. More groups coming aboard with my .NET client framework, so I was asked to pay another visit to London during the week of July 16. That's 3 times in London in less than a year. I don't mind going to London ... the first-class service aboard Virgin Atlantic is stellar, and this time, I was treated to massages on both legs of the trip.
What was exciting about this trip is that the department that I was meeting with are going to be taking four of their separate apps and combining them in a single consolidated front-end, with each particular group's app "running" as a separate DLL, registering services, and communicating with the other "apps" through my internal message bus. Still no separate app domains though.
2) My son is in college now! Yeah! Spent the entire weekend cleaning the house of the carnage that he and his friends wrecked during the past few years.
3) Going to be revisiting Complex Event Processing soon. Coral8 looks like a strong contender in the space. Why doesn't KX Systems realize that Q scares the mere mortal?
4) I am taking a few members of the Derivatives Analytics team up in my plane tomorrow evening. A nice flight over the Catskill Mountains is planned. Usually when I ask people to fly with me, I get all sorts of excuses. However, the DA team is too young and too inquisitive to know what they're getting into! They will even help me pre-flight the plane. As long as they don't start asking me about auronautical mathematics, the flight will go well!
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Let's see what's new ....
1) London again. More groups coming aboard with my .NET client framework, so I was asked to pay another visit to London during the week of July 16. That's 3 times in London in less than a year. I don't mind going to London ... the first-class service aboard Virgin Atlantic is stellar, and this time, I was treated to massages on both legs of the trip.
What was exciting about this trip is that the department that I was meeting with are going to be taking four of their separate apps and combining them in a single consolidated front-end, with each particular group's app "running" as a separate DLL, registering services, and communicating with the other "apps" through my internal message bus. Still no separate app domains though.
2) My son is in college now! Yeah! Spent the entire weekend cleaning the house of the carnage that he and his friends wrecked during the past few years.
3) Going to be revisiting Complex Event Processing soon. Coral8 looks like a strong contender in the space. Why doesn't KX Systems realize that Q scares the mere mortal?
4) I am taking a few members of the Derivatives Analytics team up in my plane tomorrow evening. A nice flight over the Catskill Mountains is planned. Usually when I ask people to fly with me, I get all sorts of excuses. However, the DA team is too young and too inquisitive to know what they're getting into! They will even help me pre-flight the plane. As long as they don't start asking me about auronautical mathematics, the flight will go well!
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Panopticon Rebuttal
A few weeks ago, I made the comment that we have had some good success with the free Microsoft TreeMap control to implement heatmaps. I also mentioned the fact that, for our needs, the Microsoft product seemed to suffice and that I did not see any immediate reason to buy the Panopticon product for heatmaps.
The Panopticon people asked me for some time on my blog to address the difference between the Treemap and their product, so I have reprinted their comments verbatim:
“What we at Panopticon Software offer in the product called Panopticon Developer is an SDK for embedding visual analysis and monitoring functionality into applications by means of integrating components such as interactive visualizations and a powerful data model capable of aggregating real-time data streams. The Microsoft Treemap control seems in to be considerably smaller and restricted in its API and designed to be used as a simple chart library and therefore for example does not include analytical functionality. Collateral posted at (public url at www.panopticon.com) provides more detailed information on how Panopticon Developer is compares in relation to more traditional chart libraries.
With this SDK we’ve built a rapid web deployment toolkit called Panopticon Enterprise which provides very low ownership costs, extremely short time to market while preserving the functionality available in the SDK.
We typically work out significantly cheaper than in-house build due to the lack of maintenance and ease of deployment for new requirements”
(end of Panopticon comment .. now back to Marc)
Like any company, we have a budget that is tightly controlled. If Panopticon, or any third-party product, provides fiunctionality that will cost us more to develop ourselves, then the decision is to go to a third-party product. We like the fact that a third-party will support the product, but on the other hand, custom developing something ourselves gives us tight control over the feature set without having to wait for release cycles from a vendor. But, if we can take an existing free product and, with relatively little effort, modify it to do what we need, then I would be neglecting my fiduciary responsbility as an officer of the company to purchase a third-party product and pay a continuing stream of license and maintanence fees.
We are only at the beginning of exploring what heatmap technology can do for us, and in addition to Panopticon, there are other fish out there like Fractal Edge (makers of what I like to call the Undulating Amoeba heatmap!)
If there are any of you out there who have used or evaluated heatmap products, I would love to get your comments.
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
The Panopticon people asked me for some time on my blog to address the difference between the Treemap and their product, so I have reprinted their comments verbatim:
“What we at Panopticon Software offer in the product called Panopticon Developer is an SDK for embedding visual analysis and monitoring functionality into applications by means of integrating components such as interactive visualizations and a powerful data model capable of aggregating real-time data streams. The Microsoft Treemap control seems in to be considerably smaller and restricted in its API and designed to be used as a simple chart library and therefore for example does not include analytical functionality. Collateral posted at (public url at www.panopticon.com) provides more detailed information on how Panopticon Developer is compares in relation to more traditional chart libraries.
With this SDK we’ve built a rapid web deployment toolkit called Panopticon Enterprise which provides very low ownership costs, extremely short time to market while preserving the functionality available in the SDK.
We typically work out significantly cheaper than in-house build due to the lack of maintenance and ease of deployment for new requirements”
(end of Panopticon comment .. now back to Marc)
Like any company, we have a budget that is tightly controlled. If Panopticon, or any third-party product, provides fiunctionality that will cost us more to develop ourselves, then the decision is to go to a third-party product. We like the fact that a third-party will support the product, but on the other hand, custom developing something ourselves gives us tight control over the feature set without having to wait for release cycles from a vendor. But, if we can take an existing free product and, with relatively little effort, modify it to do what we need, then I would be neglecting my fiduciary responsbility as an officer of the company to purchase a third-party product and pay a continuing stream of license and maintanence fees.
We are only at the beginning of exploring what heatmap technology can do for us, and in addition to Panopticon, there are other fish out there like Fractal Edge (makers of what I like to call the Undulating Amoeba heatmap!)
If there are any of you out there who have used or evaluated heatmap products, I would love to get your comments.
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Thursday, August 16, 2007
It's the Models, Stupid
I just can't think that, in the world that we deal with, our efforts spent on low-latency, code optimization, high throughput, best algo containers, etc ... are worthless if the models are not good.
Doesn't matter how fast you get your trades out to the exchanges if you are always on the wrong side of the trade.
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Doesn't matter how fast you get your trades out to the exchanges if you are always on the wrong side of the trade.
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Saturday, July 28, 2007
Trading Floor
I am straddling two positions at the moment. I am still at my current position as SVP of Equity Derivatives at my company, but I am also doing a slow transition to the Derivatives Analytics desk on the business side. So, for the latter role, I have been sitting on the massive Equities trading floor at my company.
The contract in the physical difference in the two roles is stark. In my position in Architecture, I sit in a big office in an old Lucent campus in the middle of North/Central New Jersey, about 35 miles from Allentown, Pa. The place is almost like a morgue ... I could go there, sit in my office, and not see anyone for an entire day.
On the other hand, the trading floor is located in the middle of very hip Tribeca. This is not your father's Tribeca. You have 20 gourmet restaurants within two blocks of my office. You can look out the 20-foot windows that overlook the Hudson River and see the Statue of Liberty. You can see pretty girls walking across the floor all day long.
When I am sitting at the Derivatives Analytics quant desk, there is the amazing energy that accompanies a trading floor. I was lucky enough to be on the floor for these last two trading days, where the Dow dropped 500 points. There was cheering, shouting, tension, madness. It reminded me of the old days, when I started out on Wall Street as a consultant for Goldman Sachs, and then went to consult for Drexel Burnham. In those days, we developing the first cut of Windows-based trading workstations, so we would always get traders who looked over our shoulders, commenting on our work.
It has been no secret that I am fascinated with the quant world. I am sitting with truly brilliant people who talk a different language that I barely understand. Even though the quants at my desk are 50% Russian, they talk in English, throwing around terms like Kurtosis and Skew Risk, terms which have me madly scrambling to Google. Terms which may me wish that I had not shown up drunk to Statistics 101 class every day in college!
It is interesting to have these quants coming up to me, apologizing for their code. Maybe I can teach them a little bit about software and architecture, and they can teach me how to Delta Hedge my portfolios!
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
The contract in the physical difference in the two roles is stark. In my position in Architecture, I sit in a big office in an old Lucent campus in the middle of North/Central New Jersey, about 35 miles from Allentown, Pa. The place is almost like a morgue ... I could go there, sit in my office, and not see anyone for an entire day.
On the other hand, the trading floor is located in the middle of very hip Tribeca. This is not your father's Tribeca. You have 20 gourmet restaurants within two blocks of my office. You can look out the 20-foot windows that overlook the Hudson River and see the Statue of Liberty. You can see pretty girls walking across the floor all day long.
When I am sitting at the Derivatives Analytics quant desk, there is the amazing energy that accompanies a trading floor. I was lucky enough to be on the floor for these last two trading days, where the Dow dropped 500 points. There was cheering, shouting, tension, madness. It reminded me of the old days, when I started out on Wall Street as a consultant for Goldman Sachs, and then went to consult for Drexel Burnham. In those days, we developing the first cut of Windows-based trading workstations, so we would always get traders who looked over our shoulders, commenting on our work.
It has been no secret that I am fascinated with the quant world. I am sitting with truly brilliant people who talk a different language that I barely understand. Even though the quants at my desk are 50% Russian, they talk in English, throwing around terms like Kurtosis and Skew Risk, terms which have me madly scrambling to Google. Terms which may me wish that I had not shown up drunk to Statistics 101 class every day in college!
It is interesting to have these quants coming up to me, apologizing for their code. Maybe I can teach them a little bit about software and architecture, and they can teach me how to Delta Hedge my portfolios!
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Friday, June 22, 2007
Next Gen Heatmaps of the Markets?
The next generation of heatmaps?
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129
Can we also employ tactile feedback using Microsoft Surface? So we can FEEL the market? Make the hot areas really generate heat?
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129
Can we also employ tactile feedback using Microsoft Surface? So we can FEEL the market? Make the hot areas really generate heat?
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Saturday, June 16, 2007
The Flavor of the Month is Acropolis
Now, after touting CAB for a few months, Microsoft has announced Acropolis.
A few months ago, the Microsoft DPE team came to me and tried to dissuade us from developing our .NET client framework in favor of using CAB. However, during those conversations, the word Acropolis came up a few times.
Now that Microsoft is touting Acropolis, what has become of CAB? Will this now be an officially supported framework (remember ObjectSpaces?). What about all of the financial service developers that committed to CAB? And, now you have some Microsoft people telling us that CAB was never officially supported by Microsoft, that it was developed by a small group of independent developers in some far off country that nobody ever heard of!
One thing about developing your own framework and making it a standard in the company is that it won't turn into a flavor-of-the-month entry. Goldman lead the way with OCEAN. Wachovia has OneSource, and Morgan Stanley has FidSharp and Concord. And we have ours. And, our companies tell our developers that they should use it.
No doubt that Acropolis will be "better" than CAB, and will have learned lessons and anti-patterns from CAB usage. Only, what will Microsoft come out with in another 6 months?
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
A few months ago, the Microsoft DPE team came to me and tried to dissuade us from developing our .NET client framework in favor of using CAB. However, during those conversations, the word Acropolis came up a few times.
Now that Microsoft is touting Acropolis, what has become of CAB? Will this now be an officially supported framework (remember ObjectSpaces?). What about all of the financial service developers that committed to CAB? And, now you have some Microsoft people telling us that CAB was never officially supported by Microsoft, that it was developed by a small group of independent developers in some far off country that nobody ever heard of!
One thing about developing your own framework and making it a standard in the company is that it won't turn into a flavor-of-the-month entry. Goldman lead the way with OCEAN. Wachovia has OneSource, and Morgan Stanley has FidSharp and Concord. And we have ours. And, our companies tell our developers that they should use it.
No doubt that Acropolis will be "better" than CAB, and will have learned lessons and anti-patterns from CAB usage. Only, what will Microsoft come out with in another 6 months?
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Short Sell Any Time
(Thanks to Wall Street Folly)
The SEC voted unanimously on Wednesday to finally get rid of the pesky and ridiculously outdated tick test. The tick test only allows short sales when the last sale price is higher than the previous price. That means a trader cannot short a stock if the movement prior to the short sale is down
Wonder what this means for all of the models out there? (I mean HFT and Algo models, not Giselle Bunchen-type models... but, I am sure that Heidi Klum is overjoyed too!)
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
The SEC voted unanimously on Wednesday to finally get rid of the pesky and ridiculously outdated tick test. The tick test only allows short sales when the last sale price is higher than the previous price. That means a trader cannot short a stock if the movement prior to the short sale is down
Wonder what this means for all of the models out there? (I mean HFT and Algo models, not Giselle Bunchen-type models... but, I am sure that Heidi Klum is overjoyed too!)
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Fun with Patents in Financial Services
It's great fun to browse the United States Patent Office to see what your colleagues have come up with in the financial industry. It's even more fun to see who has patented what. In the search page, type your favorite company into the "Assignee" field. Even though you and I can create a great technology, and we *may* be able to be listed as the Inventor, we usually have to Assign the work to the company we work for.
Just take a look at one of the patents. It's from Goldman Sachs. Andy Smith is the creator of Goldman's .NET client framework, OCEAN. In that respect, we are counterparts.
It's also fun to se who was credited as the Inventors of a technology. For example, some Merrill Lynch patents list (the late) Don Trojan and Ed Keenan as the Inventors. I know for a fact that Don and Ed were managers at Merrill, and in my opinion, probably never got anywhere near the technology. (Ed was my wife's first boss at ML, and was a pure manager. Don was my wife's boss at Drexel Burnham Lambert.)
If you want to see the diagrams that are associated with the patent, then click on the Images link. However, you need to download a TIF viewer for your web browser before you can view the images.
As I write this, let's see if some of our favorite characters have patented anything....
John Powers of Digipede : Nothing.... But don't look at this and this.
Geva Perry of GigaSpaces : Nada .... (Maybe they have patents in Israel?) But let's try one of GigaSpaces' competitors, Gemstone. Well, lookee here and here. And here.
You guys should learn the lessons of old Xerox, and make a beeline to your favorite patent attorney! Patents are some of your greatest assets.
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Just take a look at one of the patents. It's from Goldman Sachs. Andy Smith is the creator of Goldman's .NET client framework, OCEAN. In that respect, we are counterparts.
It's also fun to se who was credited as the Inventors of a technology. For example, some Merrill Lynch patents list (the late) Don Trojan and Ed Keenan as the Inventors. I know for a fact that Don and Ed were managers at Merrill, and in my opinion, probably never got anywhere near the technology. (Ed was my wife's first boss at ML, and was a pure manager. Don was my wife's boss at Drexel Burnham Lambert.)
If you want to see the diagrams that are associated with the patent, then click on the Images link. However, you need to download a TIF viewer for your web browser before you can view the images.
As I write this, let's see if some of our favorite characters have patented anything....
John Powers of Digipede : Nothing.... But don't look at this and this.
Geva Perry of GigaSpaces : Nada .... (Maybe they have patents in Israel?) But let's try one of GigaSpaces' competitors, Gemstone. Well, lookee here and here. And here.
You guys should learn the lessons of old Xerox, and make a beeline to your favorite patent attorney! Patents are some of your greatest assets.
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Google Spam
I have been fairly sparse on this blog lately. I have been incredibly busy at work. But, the main reason is that Google had mistakenly tagged my blog as a spam blog.
Everything is back to normal now.
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Everything is back to normal now.
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Favorite new blog
http://enhyper.blogspot.com/
A lot of good stuff on implementing HPC within financial services firms.
The author of the blog just took a job with 29West in London, the makers of LBM (Wombat is a big user of LBM). He regularly hosts drinking sessions in London with interesting guest speakers.
(Since I showed Terry the blog, he has already found more reasons to stay late at work. Sorry, mate!)
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
A lot of good stuff on implementing HPC within financial services firms.
The author of the blog just took a job with 29West in London, the makers of LBM (Wombat is a big user of LBM). He regularly hosts drinking sessions in London with interesting guest speakers.
(Since I showed Terry the blog, he has already found more reasons to stay late at work. Sorry, mate!)
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Object Caches for .NET
Reminder to self ---
Now that Tangasol, Gigaspaces and Gemstone have native .NET APIs for their caches, I need to re-evaluate the three. The advantages of distributed object caching is being picked up by some other groups in my company.
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Now that Tangasol, Gigaspaces and Gemstone have native .NET APIs for their caches, I need to re-evaluate the three. The advantages of distributed object caching is being picked up by some other groups in my company.
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Heatmaps
I decided to integrate the Treemap control (ie: Heatmap) from Microsoft Research into my .NET client-side framework that my company now uses. As a demo, I emulated the heatmap found on the Smart Money site. The free Microsoft heatmap was fairly easy to develop for, and in almost no time, I had real-time trades streaming from KDB+ into the framework, with the trade data displayed in the heatmap.
Given what we have, it may be more difficult to rationalize paying that big yearly license fee to Panopticon.
The Bubble Chart control is worthwhile too.
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Given what we have, it may be more difficult to rationalize paying that big yearly license fee to Panopticon.
The Bubble Chart control is worthwhile too.
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
WPF and Vol Surface Editors
Microsoft came in the other day and showed some Silverlight and WPF demos. Infusion Development wrote a demo of a vol surface viewer (not an editor). According to the guys from MSFT, you can actually embed the WPF control within a .NET 2.0 Winforms app.
Our main col surface editor was written upteen years ago, using Open GL. It would be interesting to see how a WPF vol surface/curve editor would compare, especially when the CPU is busy handlign feeds and calculating greeks.
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
Our main col surface editor was written upteen years ago, using Open GL. It would be interesting to see how a WPF vol surface/curve editor would compare, especially when the CPU is busy handlign feeds and calculating greeks.
©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved
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