All winners here:

http://www.aftas.org/static/winners-2010

Level 1: Lowest dollar cost – is it really the cheapest option if it takes twice as long ?

Level 2: Total Cost of Project – factor time to completion, debugging, compliance, etc

Level 3: Risk-adjusted cost perspective – probability of success for the investment

Level 4: Innovation – the need to bring new ideas to the table

Needless to say, there is indeed a tight correlation between these levels and the timeliness/quality of the final product….

On the marketing front, we have written a lot of great articles this year, and have been in a number of other features, providing commentary to the relevant stories. They can all be read on the Lab49 website here with the articles carved out in a separate page here. A few highlights:

Waters Special Report: IT in Crisis: Lab49 sponsored a special report in the SIFMA edition of the magazine, the theme of which how financial institutions should be addressing the current challenges presented by the financial crisis, and how, by investing in the right technology, firms can radically improve their agility and intelligence.

Robust, Reusable Drag-and-Drop Behavior in Silverlight discusses how developers can can greatly increase the overall robustness and re-usability of any drag-and-drop implementation in Silverlight, through the manipulation of an element’s RenderTransform with attached behaviors.

Riding the Tsunami discusses why firms need to update their trading and risk infrastructures and implement a holistic approach with a balance of powerful new technologies. 

Building a bank from scratch hypothesizes what it would take to rebuild bank systems from scratch to support real-time data aggregation and analysis, to provide a platform to capitalize on next-generation technologies, and to accommodate constant change. The article also outlines what principles, technologies and processes should be put in place to facilitate the optimal solution.

Concurrency: Take Control or Fail discusses how new trends in hardware demand the adoption of parallel programming throughout the financial enterprise, and why firms need to start getting up to speed now, or risk falling behind.

Overall, it was great to hear from the man himself on how he approaches visualizing data and how one can achieve information density: showing causality, focusing on the information to be presented over the form of production, to integrating different form of production (text, image, graphs), etc. I enjoyed the specific references to the visualization work (and thus principles), that Gailileo used almost 400 years ago. Specifically, the use of intuitive graphics that portray meaningful data inline with text (just as sparklines can), is a very powerful concept that I think will become a dominant form of communication especially when those graphics are driven off live data.

ET gave his usual amusing powerpoint (PP) bashing routine, most of it very much merited. In general, PP is a bad communication medium, and does encourage slovenly thinking of the material being presented. I liked his comment on how PP is simply a “projector-management” system.

In general, I agree with most of Edwards thinking with respect to the cleanliness and density of content on the visualization – and it is particularly true on printed media. However, I felt that more could be done to update the ideas for the monitor display form ( see his commentary on the iPhone here).  We all use pretty high-res monitors, and traders tend to have the very best, if not HD. Monitors are becoming increasing pervasive and a lot more thinking can and should be done in optimizing information density and clarity on trading applications. Once full touch screens are available, new opportunities for interactivity will present themselves and thus drive the engraining of the medium. 

So, with that said, I feel that many of the principles of visualization data in general, as well as some of his ideas for maximizing content (over admin junk such as scroll bars, buttons, navigation, etc.) are well founded. The advice that no more than 10% of the screen should be for non-content is also a very good sanity check.

BUT, in capital markets there are a number of scenarios where the visualization of high-frequency and complex data do  not have elegant solutions (other than some of the ideas at Lab49 ) . Yeah, sparklines are nice and have tremendous information density for showing a lot of linear ticking data and showing absolute and relative trends. I wonder how E.T. would approach some of the situations we have to deal with like: a) full market depth view of fragmented markets in real-time, b) multi-dimensional pricing and risk (e.g. diversified portfolios that need to be viewed across asset, geography, industry, company dimensions, for example), c) credit risk of a portfolio of structured products ?

Waters Magazine has just published my article “Flying By Wire” in its Open Platform section of the August issue. The article discusses how advanced trading systems need better control systems to dependably innovate and take new opportunities to market. I draw an analogy between trading systems and modern jet aircraft where stability, performance and control are essential characteristics that need to be considered during design, development and testing. Read the article on the Lab49 website here.

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.

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.

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.

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