{"id":120,"date":"2010-09-16T14:59:43","date_gmt":"2010-09-16T13:59:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/base6.com\/?p=120"},"modified":"2010-09-17T08:12:05","modified_gmt":"2010-09-17T07:12:05","slug":"a-team-london-insight-exchange","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/base6.com\/2010\/09\/16\/a-team-london-insight-exchange\/","title":{"rendered":"A-Team London Insight Exchange"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Myself and a colleague were offered some tickets for the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.a-teamgroup.com\/insightexchange\/lon-sep\/\">A-Team Insight Exchange<\/a> (High Performance Technologies for Trading and Risk) in London yesterday, and were able to get away from our desk long enough to attend the first half of the day!<\/p>\n<p>Overall a lot of the things discussed were things that we were already aware of as a team, and although it was disappointing not to have any huge takeaways from the day it was heartening to know that our team is at pace with the current state of the art (although clearly the state of the art as presented predominately by vendors at such a conference does not necessarily equal the true state of the art in in-house technologies developed by banks\/funds).<\/p>\n<p>A few interesting themes from the day:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Integration\/Standards<\/strong> \u2013 A lot of interest in making proprietary components e.g. for risk\/algorithmic execution use industry standards (e.g. <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/FIXatdl\">FIXatdl<\/a> for algo trading) to speed up integration and facilitate reuse of off the shelf components.<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li><strong>Build vs buy<\/strong> \u2013 Many of the panel discussions focused around this with the vendors obviously arguing the buy case for time to market, less developers required etc.<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li><strong>Interest in low-latency\/HFT increasingly spreading to FX\/options<\/strong> \u2013 According to the vendors, a lot of the technologies previously used almost exclusively by equities such as <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/InfiniBand\">InfiniBand<\/a>\/<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/10_Gigabit_Ethernet\">10 GigE<\/a> and colocation are now being taken up by increasing numbers of customers for FX\/options.<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li><strong>The need for education<\/strong> \u2013 One of the panel members made an interesting point that a lot of customers have infrastructure teams who have no idea what the High Frequency Trading teams in their bank are doing, this can be counter-productive as the HFT teams build\/support everything themselves as they don\u2019t feel they can trust the infrastructure teams to understand\/implement their requirements correctly. If infrastructure teams were better educated about HFT\/low-latency this would be less of an issue.<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li><strong>Different types of latency<\/strong> \u2013 Darshan Chandarana from Oracle address touched on realtime JVMs a bit and re-iterated the fact that it is generally not possible to have both the lowest latency and maximum determinism \u2013 realtime technologies generally decrease variance at the expense of increasing\u00a0 the mean. The only counterexample given to this was <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/InfiniBand\">InfiniBand<\/a>, which apparently is indeed a magic bullet!<\/li>\n<p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>A few interesting vendors:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.panopticon.com\/\"><strong>Panopticon<\/strong><\/a> \u2013 Partners of Sybase\u2019s CEP offering (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.sybase.co.uk\/products\/financialservicessolutions\/aleristreamingplatform\">Aleri<\/a>), they demoed alongside Sybase. Some interesting visualisations on top of the risk system (e.g. their <a href=\"http:\/\/www.panopticon.com\/data_visualizations\/treemap_tree_mapping_information_visualisation_software.htm\">treemap<\/a>).<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sumerian.com\/\"><strong>Sumerian<\/strong><\/a> \u2013 Came up with a nice sound byte in one of the panel discussions: \u201cLatency is a distribution, not a number\u201d. This piqued my interest as this was a view that our team hold which some of the other latency monitoring vendors we have previously met didn\u2019t implement. Also, unlike some of the other vendors we have previously met, Sumerian&#8217;s approach is not a real-time dashboard &#8211; instead data is shipped to them and they analyse it to produce a one-off report which identifies which areas of the system are most latent and therefore benefit from development investment. Obviously there are pros and cons to this approach vs a real-time monitoring dashboard.<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.oracle.com\/\"><strong>Oracle<\/strong><\/a> &#8211; Thanks to the merger with Sun, they are now producing hybrid appliances using Sun hardware, e.g. they believe they have built one of the fastest database servers available (and they had brought this in an impressive <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.oracle.com\/oracleopenworld\/exadata09.jpg\">display rack<\/a> to their stand). Will be interesting to see if they come up with any challenges to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.azulsystems.com\/\">Azul<\/a> in the JVM appliance space.<\/li>\n<p>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Myself and a colleague were offered some tickets for the A-Team Insight Exchange (High Performance Technologies for Trading and Risk) in London yesterday, and were able to get away from our desk long enough to attend the first half of the day! Overall a lot of the things discussed were things that we were already [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,18],"tags":[36774,26664,26,29104,22418,24254,22809,33036],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/base6.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/base6.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/base6.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/base6.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/base6.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/base6.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":135,"href":"https:\/\/base6.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120\/revisions\/135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/base6.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/base6.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/base6.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}