A week after I last chimed in about our Intelligent Trading Summit in London on March 4 – to be reprised in New York on May 13 – our programme is taking shape. What we’ve pulled together is yet another step in our journey from Low Latency infrastructures into the very brave new world of intelligent trading technology.
As I mentioned before, we’re thrilled to be supported by platinum sponsors Fidessa, gold sponsors Azul, IBM and DataWatch, and silver sponsors SGI. We believe the mix of sponsors and additional exhibitors at the event represents the transition as we start to understand the convergence of low latency, big data and analytics. Certainly, delegates are going to hear quite a lot about all three.
Providing context, we’ll hear from Fidessa’s Steve Grob, who’ll be outlining his Vision for Intelligent Trading in the 21st Century. I’ve known Steve for years, and worked with him on many previous occasions, and I’m excited to hear what he’s finding during his constant exposure to Fidessa trading clients around the globe.
For our afternoon keynote, we’ll be hearing from Steve Wilcockson, who looks after financial services for MathWorks, whose MatLab analytics engine forms the basis of many firms’ quantitative and other algorithmic trading outfits. Steve will be presenting on the ever-thorny issue of human resources, specifically the skill-set gap in trading technology and analytics. His presentation will be based on some recent research conducted by MathWorks, which will be available from Steve and his entourage on the day.
To help us frame the day’s discussion, we’ve got a great scene-setting panel first thing, in which we’ll be asking: What Does Intelligent Trading Look Like? We’ll be joined by Richard Bell, Fixed Income eTrading Latency, Performance & Big Data, at BNP Paribas, Mike Powell, Managing Director, Enterprise, at Thomson Reuters; and Stuart Grant, EMEA Business Development Manager – Financial Services, at SAP.
We’ll be looking at what intelligent trading is, and what elements are needed to create a technology and data architecture to support it. What can be bought, what needs to be proprietary? What performance challenges are there? Where are the bottlenecks? How to scale? How to be reliable and resilient? How to make it agile and adaptable?
A step further down the food chain, our next panel will look at how Big Data tools can be used to build trading algorithms and analytics. Panelists Peter Simpson, Senior VP, Research & Development, at Datawatch, and IBM’s Roman Chwyl will discuss how Big Data technology and tools can augment in-house expertise, and where can they be used most effectively.
It’s often said that if you can’t measure it, you can’t analyse it. Latency measurement is an established practice that’s been used with great success to optimize trading connections for business advantage. Now, performance measurement is being expanded into new areas of the trading work flow, as increasingly sophisticated tools measure not only connectivity and data feed performance, but relative performance of exchange platforms, algorithms and smart order routers.
Some question whether operational analytics of this kind can truly yield business benefits. So our panel on Leveraging Operational Analytics in Trading Operations explores what’s possible, and whether the practitioners can create competitive advantage from it. Alex Batlin, Group CTO Applied Innovation, at UBS will be joined by veterans (yes, I’ve known them an awful long time) Nick Idelson, Technical Director, TraderServe, and Henry Young, Founder and CEO, TS-Associates, for what promises to be a lively debate.
Next up is managed services and trading in the cloud, and how these approaches can impact TCO. The combination of more complex markets, tougher regulatory scrutiny, increased competition and shrinking margins is driving the consideration (and adoption) of more efficient and cost-effective business models. These include the integration of trade execution and analytic capabilities that not only enable better-informed trading decisions, but incorporate real-time risk management and performance measurement that improve efficiency and customer communication.
The panel – featuring Bill Fenick, Strategy and Marketing Director, Financial Services, at Interxion and a representative from Fidessa – will examine not only how fast and widespread the adoption of these can develop, but whether they will also be driven by the use of managed services or SaaS (pay-as-you-go) models.
After the 3pm coffee break, we’ll hand the programme over to a couple of sponsor workshops. The first, Leveraging HPC Expertise for Intelligent Trading Workflows, will be led by Rod Evans, Vice President of Sales, EMEA, SGI. Then we’ll hear from Gil Tene, CTO and Co-Founder, Azul Systems, who’ll be looking at Optimizing Java Performance for Intelligent Trading.
Last but by no means least, we’ll retire upstairs to network and discuss the day’s proceedings over a cocktail or two. We may even buy you one…
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