Github for MacOS desktop

Using GitHub is now prettier on Mac or Windows

Scala

Not looked at Scala for a long time, but for a current project it does look like a very good fit.

Fixed Income Leaders Summit 2017, Amsterdam

Looking forward to this:

And https://fixedincome.wbresearch.com/event-agenda-day/Thursday-9th-November-2017

Disaster Recovery, von Moltke and Schrödinger

Further to our earlier post FIX, Electronic Trading and Disaster Recovery it's worthwhile to emphasis some points.

Helmuth Von Moltke was a Prussian general and military theorist who followed in the footsteps of Carl von Clausewitz (as an aside, if you can invest the time, reading "On War" is a powerful experience).

One of his famous aphorisms was:

"No plan survives contact with the enemy"

Erwin Schrödinger created the thought experiment that took his name - Schrödinger's Cat

Until you look in the box the cat is neither alive nor dead but in a quantum superposition of both alive and dead.

So - combine these two concepts with FIX, Electronic Trading and Disaster Recovery and what do you get?  Some rather tortured mixed metaphors for which the author apologises, but here we go...

No Disaster Recovery plan is actually real unless it faces the enemy and is seen to function.  An untested Disaster Recovery plan is very likely to turn out to be a dead cat in a box.

When looking at a DR plan - ask this question:

"When was the plan last executed?"

If the answer is one or more of

• more than a year ago
• before a big application upgrade
• before a hardware refresh
• before an office move
• before a change of personnel running the execution of the DR plan
• before any merger or acquisition
• before any divestment or closure of a business line

Then it's time to run it again and look at what's in the box...

FIX, Electronic Trading and Disaster Recovery

An often overlooked part of Electronic Trading implementations is the world of high availability/disaster recovery/business continuity.

Why?  Simply put, because it's hard and expensive.  Let's look at this more closely...

Visual Studio for Mac

Microsoft Visual Studio for Mac. Had a minor issue with installing, after manually installing the Mono framework and restarting the installer this worked ok.

Fintech: What is an OMS?

This is post that has been requested several times, but we have never been able to write about this topic without producing a "War and Peace" tendency article.  And so today, here's the long version of the answer to that question...

Blackberry KEYone: Where are the USB drivers?

Regular readers will know that we retain a fondness for all things Blackberry. With the release of the KEYone - we thought it worthwhile to give a brief review.

Apple: How not to do eCommerce - sell me the cable I want!!!

You are a consultant travelling all round the world and you spend a lot of time in Europe.  So a set of adapters for electrical sockets are really useful...

FIX Networks: Small is beautiful

An interesting paradox...

TradeTech 2017 Paris Day 2, Wednesday 26th April

Looking forward to this! Some great people taking time out to share knowledge with their industry peers. 

FIGI - 24% of Asset Managers?

A recent article in The Trade News makes some bold assertions.  Let's examine:

Exchanges and their matching engines

Another list based blog post, this time on Exchanges and their matching engines.  This will be a work-in-progress and will be updated over time. 

FIX Orchestra: RC1 out now - next steps and looking ahead

As published recently here the release candidate 1 for FIX Orchestra has been released. A lot of work from a number of good people has gone into this (I take credit for the name, as a play on my original implementation of FIIDL - pronounced "fiddle").

FIX: Co-located onboarding?

FIX testing is very much regarded as an unglamorous part of the financial technology landscape.  But it's essential for most electronic trading relationships to work (yes, other protocols are available such as ITCH/OUCH, but I would suggest that in value terms traded per day FIX is king of the hill).