Tales from a Trading Desk

Noise from an Investment Bank

September 2005 - Posts

ScrumWorks
1.4 RC appears to be available.
Posted: Sep 30 2005, 09:57 PM by mdavey | with 1 comment(s)
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"Its not going to work"

Paul's article provides an interesting insight into Microsoft and Vista's development.  It a shame Paul hasn't actually been able to speak to the people who are knowledgeable about the "reset" event.  It would be interesting to find out what the general issues where and how they were resolved.  Has the Vista development team adopted any agile techniques?  Given the size and complexity of developing Vista, I'm sure if some of this information was made public it could benefit the whole of the software development industry?  Maybe that's why its not being made public?

The new network stack coupled with a re-write of the event logging system and audio stack means Vista is really stacking up to be almost a band new OS.  Definately an impressive turn around from the last PDC Longhorn release back in 2003.

Posted: Sep 30 2005, 09:33 PM by mdavey | with 1 comment(s)
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Xgrid
Why doesn't windows offer this out the box?
Posted: Sep 30 2005, 10:38 AM by mdavey | with 3 comment(s)
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Xp NYC
Anyone know of any XP/Agile groups in New York?  I can find XpNyc. Is XpNyc the equivalent of ExtremeTuesday?
Posted: Sep 26 2005, 11:07 AM by mdavey | with 2 comment(s)
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IPE

I see both the Nymex and London's International Petrolenum Exchanged (IPE) opened yesterday (Sunday) due to Hurricane Rita.  IPE historical volumes can be viewed here.  I'd have to guess that with the current volatility in the natural resources market, trading desks within investment banks and energy companies are being expanded, and new trading systems developed?  Anyone in Shell, BP etc got a view on this?

Update: Big firms return to energy Citi, JPMorgan, Top Energy Lenders, Can't Match Goldman Traders

Microsoft Financial Services

I see Marley has posted information about the Financial Services day at the PDC this year.  If your company works in the financial services arena with Microsoft products then it's probably important to be part of these gatherings.  Marley's posting implies there will be an FSG DevCon in NYC during early 2006.

Update: FS DevCon 2005 materialCihangir semi-financial blog.

Posted: Sep 23 2005, 09:00 AM by mdavey | with no comments
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Agile 2005 Conference CD Review

I finally got round to reviewing all the presentations on the Agile 2005 Conference CD. 

From the Agile Project Management presentations, I noticed that APLN has some interesting articles. Scott Ambler has a number of Agile Data presentations worth a read.  Mike Cohn also offers his usual high quality planning agile presentations, always worth a read.  I noticed Big Visible Charts was reference by one PDF, as was Industry XP.

Christopher Avery has a few papers that are worth of a read by not just the agile community; 10 Principles for leading as a Partner, 9 Keys for Taking Responsibility for Teamwork.

Sutherland's Parallel Pipeling of Sprints is a must read if you go with Scrum.

The "Experience Reports" folder of the CD has a number of interesting presentations, including:

As did the "Tutorial" folder that offered among others:

Posted: Sep 21 2005, 09:09 PM by mdavey | with 2 comment(s)
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Grids and Trader Workstations

Daniel recently asked me if I had any experience in using trader’s workstations for pricing jobs.  Since pricing trades is usually a complete and CPU intensive exercise (due to the quantity/types of trades), its often the case that the calculations are done on dedicated servers, cluster farms, or grids.  Grids (such as DataSynapse, Platform etc) can be comprised of dedicated engine hardware, and/or CPU scavenging hardware.  CPU scavenging opens the door to the possibility of using the trader’s high powered multi-CPU workstations as part of the grid's resources.  Assuming scavenged hardware has appropriate restrictions to avoid impacting the local user (idle for 5mins etc) anyone's workstation within an investment bank could become part of the pricing grid.  I know of a few banks that use trader workstations out of hours as part of a pricing grid.  Another prime site for CPU scavenging is the disaster recovery hardware that all banks have dedicated to traders. 

Posted: Sep 19 2005, 08:51 AM by mdavey | with no comments
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PDC Take Aways - Part I

Rootkits looks like another book worthy of a read.

Posted: Sep 16 2005, 09:40 AM by mdavey | with no comments
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Nanomicrons

6.8Ghz Portable

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