Posted by Chris Martins
Dr. Giles Nelson, Chief Technology Strategist with Progress Software and a co-founder of Apama, has weighed in on the continuing debate about the possible need to regulate dark pools (Why The Outlawing Of "Dark Liquidity Pools" Debate Rumbles On) in FreshBusinessThinking.com. Beyond the thoughtful summary of the current issues, one might want to read any article that includes a reference to "the devil's spawn."
Posted by Chris Martins
Colleagues Dan Hubscher and Louie Lovas have begun a great webinar series that outlines the “lifecycle” of an algorithmic trading strategy. Illustrated with Apama’s Event Modeler, they use a Commodity Futures trading strategy to illustrate how trading firms can accelerate the delivery of trading strategies with a development tool that is accessible to the trading desk. This can help make significant cuts in development times, allowing firms to capitalize more quickly on opportunities. Future sessions will explore some of the other aspects of the platform that target developers, recognizing that firms have different business models and development styles.
We’ll be posting the recorded version shortly for on-demand viewing, but if you have not registered, I’d encourage you to click here and get on board for parts 2 and 3.
Posted by Chris Martins
Colleague Dan Hubscher, who is also a frequent contributor to this blog, can be found illustrating some of the capabilities of the Apama development environment's Apama Event Modeler in this Reuters video. With our recent 4.2 release, we significantly enhanced the Apama development capabilities overall, as we have discussed in the blog previously. But Event Modeler's ability to empower the business user (e.g. business analyst) to create event processing applications like algorithmic trading represents a longstanding feature of the Apama platform. Those interesting in seeing it "live", are encouraged to contact us for a demonstration. The picture refers to a metaphor that Dan used in the video.
Posted by Apama Audio
Listen to this podcast to hear Chris Martins and Giles Nelson discuss development of event processing applications.
Posted by Chris Martins
Well, you know that High Frequency Trading has gone mainstream when it makes Jon Stewart's The Daily Show. Check out this segment with Samantha Bee. We don't see many folks in cow costumes at our trade shows, but maybe that is a sign that HFT is going mainstream?
Posted by Apama Audio
Posted by Chris Martins
Forrester Research, a leading independent research firm,
has just published its “Wave” on CEP and Progress Apama has been judged to stand out as a leader. The evaluation
process is quite detailed and lengthy. It addresses:
· Current product offering: product
architecture, features, development environment, administration,
interoperability, etc.
·
Vendor strategy: vendor’s
product road map and other key strategy elements.
·
Market presence: market
presence in terms of customer base, vendor size and presence, etc.
We are very excited to have Apama recognized in this way. Together with the validation of our 115+ customer implementations (we don’t just score well in evaluations, but also in the real world of customers), this report speaks both to the vibrancy of the market and our leadership position. But don’t take my word for it. For a look at the actual report, including the graphical representation and the tabular scoring, you can check it out for yourself here.
Posted by Chris Martins
SIFMA is happening this week in NY and this typically
sparks a flurry of announcements in Capital Markets, as this event can be seen
as a benchmark for what is happening in the industry, similar to TradeTech
Paris for Europe earlier in the Spring. Apama
has made a series of significant announcements that capture some of the scope
of the Apama platform and what we believe is required to be successful in this
market. In different niches of the
blogosphere you’ll find some proponents of fairly narrow definitions of what
“CEP” is or how one measures CEP “leadership” or “maturity”. I think the Apama announcements illustrate a
different perspective, reflective of the breadth of the Apama platform and the
possibilities available to such a platform in terms of building new
event-driven solutions in Capital Markets.
Market Surveillance and Monitoring Accelerator
Apama has previously announced market surveillance
customers, FSA and Turquoise, and with our new enhanced Solution Accelerator we
are capturing our capabilities in a way that allows regulators, exchanges/MTFs,
and trading firms to further jumpstart deployment of monitoring applications. The idea that it would be efficacious to have
real-time monitoring of trading is becoming better understood in the indusry. If you read the release, you’ll note that the
targets are not just regulators or exchanges, but firms themselves, who would
benefit from detecting potentially damaging activities prior to that activity
hurting firm reputations or profits.
Apama Solution Accelerators provide a set of core
functions that focus on specific domain areas, but they still retain the
flexibility to evolve and adjust as circumstances require. That is key to keeping pace with very dynamic
market conditions. These Accelerators
have proven a key driver to our recent success as they marry the power of the
underlying platform with the real “end game” of providing customers with
solutions that deliver value.
As an example of the power of Solution Accelerators,
Apama also announced that UniCredit is using the Apama FX Market Aggregator
(another of our roster of Accelerators) to give their FX traders access to
prices from a number of FX liquidity venues.
UniCredit is also using the Accelerator to publish FX prices to its eFX
downstream channels. Again, a key point
here is that the use of an Accelerator in no ways constrains a client from using
the Apama tools that are part of the underlying platform to build out other
capabilities that complement the Accelerator.
For some the Accelerator is close to what is needed, but for others it
is an attractive launching point. For
further discussion of this, you might want to check out a recent Webinar on “FX
Aggregation and Beyond” that talks to this issue.
We added to our broad range of connectivity adapters with
an important connection to Lime Trading
System’s Citrius market data feed and FIX order placement services. This give our customers access to Lime’s trade
execution capabilities for equities, derivatives, ETFs, futures and
options. Apama customers can also look
to Apama applications via Lime Trading System’s collocation facilities. Lime is a really cool firm and we see this as
a great opportunity for our common customers – both those now and to come.
Connectivity is the lifeblood of CEP and other
event-driven applications. Apama has a
broad range of adapters, and we have an engineering team whose specific focus
is on this aspect of the product platform.
Integration adapters aren’t “sexy” and they don’t get a lot of attention
in marketing literature, but they are vital and deserve a bit of spotlight.
BondDesk provides 2,000 broker-dealers with access to
35,000 live and executable offerings from 120 premier fixed income dealers. In an announcement this week, we announced
that BondDesk ATS (alternative trading system) customers will be able to
register their interest in the availability of fixed income securities that
meet certain criteria and Apama will monitor the inbound data and provide
real-time notification when a matching offering becomes available on the
ATS.
So four announcements this week, and more upcoming.
So stay tuned.
.
Posted by Giles Nelson
Louis Lovas and myself, Giles Nelson, have started using Twitter to comment and respond to exciting things happening in the world of CEP (and perhaps beyond occasionally!).
The intent is to complement this blog. We'll be using Twitter to, perhaps, more impulsively report our thinking. We see Twitter as another good way to communicate thoughts and ideas.
We would be delighted if you chose to follow our "twitterings" (to use the lingo), and we'll be happy to follow you too.
Click here to follow Louis and here to follow Giles (you'll need to signup for a Twitter account).
Posted by Chris Martins
Further affirmation that low
latency execution is not the only motivator for decisions to deploy the Apama CEP
platform is found in a recent quote from Yann L'Huillier, the CTO of Turquoise. Turquoise is the London-based alternative trading
venue that is using Apama for real-time market surveillance in a project that
was managed by Progress Apama partner, Detica.
In a quite interesting interview in InformationAge that speaks to the role of technology in jumpstarting the Turquoise effort to challenge the incumbents, L'Huillier
explains "With regard to Apama and Detica, our thinking is that using a
streaming engine with complex-event processing gives us a competitive edge,
because we can change the way we read the market and adapt to the
always-changing market conditions."
That has proven to be a common - and key - reason why organizations chose the Apama CEP platform. CEP systems generally respond to conditions that they don't control, as the events are generated by external sources and the CEP system is monitoring what is happening via the events. A successful CEP system must be adaptive, as the conditions that spawn the events are assuredly going to change.
The word "agility" has become
hackneyed in the technology lexicon, but that really does describe the requirement. As the Turquoise article suggests, it can be fundamental to competitive differentiation. As a colleague recently noted to me, accuracy
is as important as speed because without accuracy, technology merely
accelerates the speed with which you get the wrong answer. With the world changing as fast as it is, accuracy
will be quite fleeting unless you can adapt quickly.
