Opening Cross
Opening Cross: Fresh Season, Fresh Faces, Fresh Ideas
Regular readers will know that I like to (over) use metaphors to make a point, and one old chestnut I return to again and again is Formula One racing. Though most often employed by myself and others to illustrate low-latency issues, the sport—which gets…
Opening Cross: Performance Anxiety Doesn't Only Apply to High Performance
With the 2015 Formula One racing season almost upon us, cue the inevitable comparisons between high-speed trading technologies and the high-performance cars that compete in the sport──cars that hit top speeds of over 200 miles per hour, and whose…
Opening Cross: Dealing with a Diaperful of Data Do-Do
Market data's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it...
Kilburn's Corner: Market Data's ‘Giving Tree'
It's time for the industry that demands so much from market data to give something back in return.
Opening Cross: When the Most Indicative Data is the Data Itself
Is the search for information itself a form of "information leakage"?
Opening Cross: Market Data’s Facebook Status Would Be ‘It’s Complicated…’
As data becomes more sophisticated, data management becomes more complicated.
Opening Cross: Do You Think of Data as a Grgich or a Gato Negro?
The other day, I was chatting with the owner of my local coffee shop about different types of coffees. He prefers African beans, lightly roasted, with bright, fruity flavors, whereas I prefer South American or Indonesian beans, roasted to within an inch…
Opening Cross: Will 2015 Be a Happy New Year?
As predictable as the inevitable wave of unwanted Christmas gift returns, the New Year has brought a wave of new fees and policies from marketplaces, including a new minimum fee from Nasdaq for exchanges, ATS and broker-run trading platforms that use non…
Opening Cross: Rudy the High-Speed Trader
Max presents a festive Christmas column for your entertainment
Opening Cross: Location, Location, Consolidation and Diversification
Today’s data industry certainly isn’t that of 25 years ago, or even a dozen years ago when I started writing about it. A key difference is the change in pace of modern markets, shifting to low-latency trading where location—i.e. proximity of trading…
Opening Cross: Putting the ‘Custom’ in ‘Customer’
Talk to a market data manager at any firm, and chances are they view vendors and exchanges as money-grubbing monsters that exist purely to squeeze revenues from their hapless clients with little thought to customer service or satisfaction.
Opening Cross: In Search of Data’s ‘Perfect Harmony’
Against the often-discordant melody of the financial markets, it’s good to know that there’s always a harmony playing in the background to support that melody, hold everything together, and ensure we’re all singing from the same songbook, rather than…
Opening Cross: The ’Center of the Data Universe
With coverage of our Asia Pacific Financial Information Conference taking center stage in this week’s Inside Market Data, debating new initiatives such as the planned Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect program—and its unexpected, indefinite delay—and the…
Opening Cross: All About That Data
This week, I had the pleasure of helping out on two of Inside Market Data’s stablemates at Incisive Media, ClickZ and Search Engine Watch, and realized that while we serve different markets and audiences, there’s a lot of crossover in terms of themes…
Opening Cross: Raising the ‘Standard’ in Terms of Cooperation
So, the industry may soon have a new standard protocol for market data distribution: and not simply a de facto standard co-opted based on existing uptake, but one specifically designed for market data needs that albeit incorporates the speed and…
Opening Cross:‘Big Data’ Is Really About ‘Big Service’
In today’s financial markets, we think of Big Data as collecting, processing and analyzing enormous quantities of information that are not traditional market data, but which may nevertheless impact prices and the markets as a whole. Much like “cloud,”…
Opening Cross: Will Cost Concerns Neuter Future Litters of CATs?
Belgian beer-maker Stella Artois’ long-running “Reassuringly Expensive” ad probably didn’t win fans among market data managers, who continue to shudder at the thought of any kind of cost increase.
Opening Cross: Getting the Message, Loud and Clear
Who would have thought that in the age of algorithmic trading, where computers trade with other computers, there would be so much interest in chat tools for human traders to communicate, share information and negotiate trades. Nevertheless, with…
Opening Cross: In Data, as in Baseball, a Great Captain Unites His Team
Whether you’re a Yankee or Red Sox supporter, you have to take your hat off to Yankees captain Derek Jeter: in his last game at Yankee Stadium, he not only made a respectful exit in front of a sold-out crowd of home fans, but also saved the day with a…
Opening Cross: The Challenge of Achieving True Data Transparency
Transparency has been a focus for regulators and market participants in the wake of the financial crisis as they try to combat the potential impact of illiquid assets and imperfect market structures. And transparency—albeit of a different sort—was also a…
Opening Cross: Data Is as Much About Getting Together as Getting It Together!
This week, all eyes will be on London and Inside Market Data’s European Financial Information Summit, which promises its usual array of lively panel discussions and roundtable debates. These events—which IMD holds in key market centers worldwide…
Opening Cross: Teenage Takeover!
I can still recall my first days at then-Risk Waters Group in 2000 as a greenhorn researcher working on Risk magazine and FX Week, trying to quickly learn new industries and lingo, while at the same time trying to hide my inexperience. One of my earliest…
Opening Cross: Sun, Summer, and the Pursuit of the ‘Simple’ Life
The world of market data is encumbered by a multitude of complexities. Not only is the business of data complex, but so is the data itself, and so too are the underlying markets and instruments that require such complex datasets. So key to preventing…
Opening Cross: Enterprise Messaging to Enterprise Management—It’s About Broadening Appeal
Pity my colleagues in London: Last Tuesday, workmen severed an ISDN cable in the street outside our office, cutting off all internet, phone, email and server access. Then on Wednesday, an explosion at an adjacent power sub-station forced a building…