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Intelligence in Finance - Summer 2008 (PDF, 510 KB)

In this issue

Introduction – A Year in the Life of Trading Technology
One year since the inaugural issue of Intelligence in Finance, Nigel Woodward, Global Director, Financial Services for Intel takes a look at developments over the last 12 months, taking us from new releases of IA (Intel Architecture) of quad core, through 45 Nm and the arrival of standardised benchmarks for comparative testing.

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SIFMA 2008 - Where we will be hosting events and talking with partners, clients and press all week!

Welcome back to Intelligence in Finance – our regular newsletter on technology related activities we see in global financial services. Launched in early 2007, we are revisiting the inaugural area of focus – trading.

An interesting year - let’s pick out some highlights.

Nigel Woodward Global Director, Financial Services Intel

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You don’t have to use the latest and greatest tech – you can always just get out of the (trading) business.

That was the message from Peter Lankford, co-founder of STAC, the New York-based Securities Technology Analysis Center.

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Working with the Thomson Reuters RDMS in the Intel fasterLAB is akin to adjusting the spoiler on a Formula 1 race car by one degree to improve performance, says Paul Gow of the consultancy, CJC Ltd.

“The RMDS is very fast and it is a very resilient piece of software. It has a lot of parameters that can be tweaked to enhance the system, and a lot of those parameters are hidden and people don’t know they exist.”

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Celoxica, a company which was spun out of Oxford University in 1996, is applying its accelerator technology, which combines hardware, firmware, APIs and services to reducing the latency in market data. Lee Staines, the company’s CEO, claims the solution can capture market data faster than any alternative available today.

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An early supporter of Intel’s initiative to establish the fasterLAB was HP – providing hardware and partner products to build out the environment.

You can’t get far away from HP in trading. Buy-side firms, major investment banks, and the London Stock Exchange (LSE) run on HP servers and they are all looking for more speed, more power in a smaller footprint with reduced energy consumption.

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Multi-core processors require multi-core capable applications, explains Simon Garland, chief strategist at Kx Systems, an extremely fast in¬memory and on-disk database that is a favorite of high-performance trading firms.

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With the demands of algorithmic trading, the drive to find and eliminate all possible points of latency has become something of an obsession. When you are hunting for milliseconds and microseconds, a stopwatch simply won’t do.

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“Pantor Inside” could become a new tagline for the Stockholm-based company which is achieving very high performance transaction processing on the latest Intel generations of processors. It uses the Intel fasterLAB to test and modify large configurations of the Pantor Framework and Pantor Fast Virtual Machine.

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An industry-wide gap has opened up between new regulatory requirements and current trading infrastructure capabilities in a fragmented market. Today, there are 260 European securities execution venues and 35 of them trade the 1,000 most liquid stocks. In practice, connecting to all of them may not be an option, but getting the best deals and prices and monitoring that deals are done in the clients’ best interests will be ever more important to retain or gain customers and keep regulators at bay.

PJ Di Giammarino CEO JWG-IT Group Ltd

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In working with several leading Tier1 firms, JWG-IT has found that most believe that 80 percent of the processes which need to be changed for MiFID compliance are non¬competitive and that solutions can be most effectively generated through collaboration.

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1 An exchange
2 A secure financial network
3 A software provider
4 An ultra high speed market data provider
5 Hosted software as a service
6 All of the above

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March and April 2008 saw a packed schedule in London with 2 fasterCITY events in quick succession – fasterTRADING on March 4 and fasteraMARKET DATA on 28 April.

Both events attracted packed audiences to this now established regular forum in The City’s calendar which puts technology developments in the context of the markets; key issues.

Nigel Woodward Global Director, Financial Services Intel

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• QuiC Achieves Landmark Speed With Intel Technology and DataSynapse
• Making Intel fasterLAB Work Faster
• Red Hat Talks Business Value at SIFMA
• STAC: Harpertown Cuts RMDS Power Consumption 16%
• JPMC, Swift & Red Hat Present at Intel’s fasterCITY event in London 23 June

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