automation

Capitalism? Both Automation and Failure Elude Major Banks

"I don't know where I'm going from here, but I promise it won't be boring." - David Bowie For someone who has spent a career scanning the landscape for cataysts - as if in perpetual "sentry mode" - it's damn near impossible to consume the latest news and not become introspective. Perhaps that is merely the occupational disposition of someone who regularly commits thoughts to pixels. It's difficult to conjure up this week's musings on the state of play without a corresponding level of seriousness and mood to risk opening Pandora's Box with a brief flurry of thoughts that are worth writing - and reading. Anyway, here we go: With the scent - and evidence - of economic upheaval in the air, I thought it would be a good time to revisit one of our older themes, the Investment Bank Headcount Index. The last time we touched on this topic was a year ago in, "How Many Heads Does It Take To Run A Bank?" It's never been a wildly [...]

By |2021-02-23T16:44:57-05:00June 4th, 2020|Open|

“Quote Stuffing” and the Collective Intellect

~ This post is a continuation of Decay of Knowledge, Rise of Tech Debt ~ Unless you are among the short list of folks with detailed understanding at the crossroads of financial market microstructure and highly-automated trading, the term quote stuffing might not ring a bell. But, since the concept behind this loaded term is germane to the points I want to make here, it is worth taking a moment to wrap your head around the basics. The parallels between the kinds of shenanigans that go on inside financial market microstructure and the emerging study of the "attention economy" or an "attention market" are fascinating. First discovered by Nanex in 2010 (shortly after the Flash Crash), quote stuffing is an automated trading technique that is used to flood trading infrastructure - namely, "matching engines" and the surrounding connectivity - with quotes that are then quickly cancelled. The goal of this strategy is to spike data flows to a point that surpasses the bandwidth capacity of the target trading infrastructure. This [...]

By |2020-10-05T21:18:45-04:00March 13th, 2018|Open|