Jon Stewart does it again.

The SEC has recently come out with an emergency order to curb “naked short selling” of certain stocks (19 in all) that include Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, Morgan Stanley, Goldman, Lehman, etc. The motivation is to alleviate the unrelenting short selling of these “vulnerable” stocks.

Currently, brokers and banks are not allowed to short sell without already having borrowed stock to cover the position. However, the precise terms of the timing of the “borrow” has been a little vague up until now. The new SEC order forces the short seller to formally borrow the stock before the short sell can occur.

This has all the major dealing houses scrambling to get these new controls in place before Monday. Additionally, it will make it more expensive to trade, and could impact the ability to trade options: traders often short-sell to hedge put option contracts they have sold. And if options traders can’t hedge themselves, they can’t sell put or buy call options.

One of the actual issues is that short sellers will often locate the stock to be borrowed on trade date, but not actually borrow it until settlement date (T+3). That can be problematic as multiple dealers can locate the same stock from the same source so when it comes to borrow, someone is left “naked”. The solution would therefore to secure the borrow on trade date, not settlement date.

Great article, “Hands-on Computing” in Scientific American this month that covers multi-touch computer screens and how this technology, including Microsoft’s Surface and the iPhone, will change the way we interact with computers and data. There is also a supplemental article explaining how multi-touch screens work.

Interesting Economist article on how the performance of the Yen indicates investor sentiment.

Joe Morrison and I just had an article published in Computer Weekly that summarizes how business customers can play a role in IT teams delivering better software more frequently and reliably. Read the article at Lab49 here, or online here.

I added a video of the Aleri MLA tool on Lab49’s website here.

I spent some time with our CEP friends at SIFMA this week - lots of new stuff going on…

Aleri - their booth was BUZZING over the last few days, mainly due to the very cool (Lab49 built) user interface for the Market Liquidity Analysis (MLA) tool. I spoke to a lot of partners, reporters and client prospects about this, almost all of whom were really excited and impressed by the offering. Aleri also have a number of feature upgrades.

Apama - announced version 4.0 that vastly improves latency, and some new offerings including a deal with NYSE Euronext’s Advanced Trading Solutions group to provide their algo platform as a hosted offering. They also announced a port to Solaris 10, and a new “real-time pricing accelerator”. Just as important, Apama had an open bar at the conference - those beers were needed late in the afternoon..

Coral8 - also announced a packaged offering with Wombat (ie NYSE Euronext ATS), and also got a nice client announcement in the form of market surveillance for LiquidNet.

Oracle - spoke to the folks at Oracle about their new combined Oracle-BEA offering that incorporates the Oracle Continuous Query language (CQL), the BEA Weblogic Event Server java container, Coherence for Distributed Cache, plus some new graphical improvements on the IDE front (finally!) and High Availability (HA) story. Clearly, an enterprise / scalability play.

Streambase - announced their new 6.0 version with an improved development & testing environment that now includes the ability debug CEP code through breakpoints, and support for unit testing (we got a demo and it is very cool). This should really help those nasty synchronization timing problems we have seen with presenting market data and complex derived data simultaneously to the user. Streambase are also narrowing their industry focus down to FS and Federal verticals, hiring more domain experts and refreshing their executive team. Good news all around.

Ken Barnes of Wombat discusses NYSE’s Advanced Trading Solutions

One of our guys just downloaded the latest version of Mingle, the project collaboration software from Thoughtworks. On initial inspection it seems to provide a nice visual interface to specify and layout features, tasks, etc for different views of the product and iteration backlogs (including a Card Tree for laying out cards in what looks like an org chart). It also supports some pretty slick (and configurable) burndown charting for whatever data you are interested in, and has a wiki for documentation. It seems to be striking a decent balance between developer collaboration and management reporting.

One feature in particular that looks really useful is an interactive online version of a card wall.  Not only is this customizable, but it can total up work effort per swimlane (which is what used to pain me when we used to use real cards & pinboards). Pretty cool stuff.

Will be interesting to see what others think of this compared to XPlanner, etc, and whether people will pay for it (it costs for projects with more than 5 people). What do people think of this compared to other “paid-for” offerings from vendors such as VersionOne and Rally ? On initial glance, it looks very functional and seems to be very flexible.

The fifth installment of the CEP podcast series has been posted here and on the Lab49 website. This is the third and final part of the interview I did with Daniel Chait of Lab49 and Brad Bailey of the Aite Group.

All of these CEP podcasts and other audio/video sessions we have recorded can be found on the Lab49 website at: http://www.lab49.com/insidethelab/audiovideo

The fourth installment of the CEP Podcast series has been posted here. This podcast is the second part of the interview I conducted with Brad Bailey of the Aite Group and Daniel Chait of Lab49. In this part we are continuing to discuss the challenges facing capital markets firms and how CEP provides an opportunity to manage these market challenges in new ways.

All of these CEP episodes, and other  podcasts we have done can be found at http://www.lab49.com/insidethelab/audiovideo

Did you know that Bear Stearns has an entire energy business, Bear Energy ? Not just trading natural gas on the financial markets, etc, but actually OWNS a powerplant ! Its trading business therefore supports its physical energy business (by buying/selling natural gas to power their powerplant, and trading the power itself). The business is built on the back of Bear’s acquisition of Williams in 2006.

(Not an April Fool’s joke). “Swiss financial giant UBS has reported that its writedowns as a result of the sub-prime crisis have more than doubled to about $37bn (£18.5bn)”. Article here. I wonder how much more has yet to unwind.

OK… this is for all of my American friends who still need to figure out a) whether I am Scottish, British or a United Kingdom citizen, b) what NOT to call me!

I went to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) yesterday to see their new exhibition, Design and The Elastic Mind. This exhibition has a vast array of really cool concepts and visualizations that is absolutely fascinating. From “Extreme Visualizations” to “Mapping The Internet” to “Nanofracture”, they did a nice job of presenting how modern design and technology impacts our lives in many different ways. For example, the Nanofracture section demonstrated the advances in nanotechnology in terms of design of modern structures and materials, as well as the modeling of the human brain. They even had a design section of how origami can be used to model everything from DNA to a Fresnel Lens used in space telescopes. There were also various static and dynamic visualizations of global internet traffic & telephony around the world and in/out of New York (see pictures on New York Talk Exchange), as well as a model of all the flights in the sky across North America in a 24hr period. All in all, a very creative and insightful exhibit that beautifully marries design, art, engineering and computational power. Most of the exhibits are online at the URL above.