Our biggest stories of the week are ...
I've posted a few items about the Deutsche Börse this week.
If you can't afford the tech, get out of the market
Most of you will know about algo trading. If you don’t, it’s just a fancy way of saying automated trading and if you checkout the stats, 80% of trading in London is automated today compared to just 40% four years ago and virtually none a decade ago. Some say it’s bad and, just as you get to grips with what these systems can do, along come algorithmic newsfeeds.
In the second article, we look further at what the Börse are doing to avoid risks in clearing and settlement:
Circuit
breakers on the Deutsche Börse
After saying yesterday that we need better risk management systems to
avoid a future meltdown, I was fascinated to hear the news about Eurex
Clearing’s developments. The presentation was titled:
“Innovation in Risk Management”, and I was intrigued from
the start. Innovation and Risk? Surely they shouldn’t be
placed together as innovation is risk, isn’t it? Maybe
not. What Eurex Clearing is introducing is a circuit breaker
system for trading firms to avoid over-exposure in the markets intra-day
and in real-time.
In the third article, we take a view on locations for trade execution:
Forget
Frankfurt, I'm moving to Basildon
Since I first met the Deutsche Börse guys, I’ve found it
challenging to work out where they are. Y’see, last year I
went to Börsenstraße in Frankfurt, as you would assume that
the Borse would be in the street named after it. Well, it used to
be ...
Meanwhile, a few other items:
Save Bulgaria's Stock Exchange
I had a reach out from Patrick Young, investment advisor, author of "The
Exchange Manifesto" and regular commentator on capital markets. Patrick co-authored an opinion piece about the nationalisation of the Bulgarian Stock Exchange in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. It appears to be an unfair and potentially destructive move.
Andrew Healy, Chief Executive of the National Irish Bank (NIB),
presents ideas for modernising payments in Ireland in a new report
released this week. He argues for two key objectives for 2013: reduce
cheque-use by 95% and reduce cash usage to below the EU average.
For a long time now, we’ve known that Ireland’s a mess when
it comes to money.
Visa: processing global payments in under a second
I've used a video from Visa Europe to illustrate what real-time
payments processing means in practice for a while now, and finally
tracked it down. It's a good video, tracking the journey of a payment from a Swedish bank customer using a mobile contactless phone in China.
As mentioned the other day, I will be at this year’s SWIFT Show
SIBOS focused upon a dialogue around the Long Now. The aim is to find
some big super-crunchy questions about the long view of banking and
finance, such as: "When will we know there won't be another
financial meltdown like the one we've just seen?"
The BBC recently reported that Sumo Wrestlers were to be given iPads as
it makes them easier to use, but it's not just Sumo Wrestlers that need
such systems. It seems many traders do too, as illustrated by these
stories of fat fingered fails over the past few years.
Summertime blues: give your firm agility
OK, you're all back from work and feeling the post-summertime holiday blues ... now think about your company. Most of you probably work for a large business. An elephant of a company. So think about how to make the Elephant dance ... now stick him on a trampoline.
After the PSD and SEPA, has anything changed?
Last year, we performed a major survey in anticipation of the
implementation of the PSD and SEPA Direct Debits, to see how the world
viewed these areas. This year, we're doing it again. Click here to take the survey.
The major general news stories of the week include ...
