What’s in a name?
That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
– William Shakespeare, Romeo & Juliet
Late last year, a group of us convened to tackle a formidable task: the naming of our next-generation professional trading platform, which we’re preparing to release later this year. We came armed with brainstorming supplies including a long list of names generated by an employee contest, ideas submitted from our agency partners, a thesaurus, many internet-connected devices and a bunch of exercises designed to spark creativity.
That initial meeting yielded a shortlist of contenders. In the weeks that followed, we continued to evaluate the options and narrow the field. We agreed that the perfect name not only needed to be catchy, unique and memorable but also reflective of what our brand is all about. Eventually, we rallied around a name that was derived from our flagship product, X_TRADER®.
People responded positively and liked what they saw in the new platform. Traders were very happy to learn that the new platform was expected to be significantly faster than our existing technology. They really liked how the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery model would make it possible for them to view and trade the markets on the latest version of our technology from practically any internet-connected desktop or mobile device. They were also eager to gain access to technology like the “forever audit trail,” which allows them to search and gain insight from their trading activity dating back to the day their TT account was created.
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Tags: Trade Execution
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Our summer 2014 interns (L to R): Ian Torres, Purav Shah,
Stephen Herring, Everett Hu, John Lefkovitz, Joshua Alley. |
We recently concluded our first official summer internship program. While we’ve had students interning with us in the past, we wanted to make this summer a more formal (and fun!) experience.
Our internship program goals are similar to the TT University Program, which provides free access to our trading platforms, APIs and expertise to more than 50 universities around the world. The main goal of the University Program is to educate and mentor the next generation of financial leaders by donating our expertise and technology to universities worldwide. Whether the students are studying finance, computer science, engineering and/or economics, we want them to understand how to use trading software in a safe, efficient way.
The goal of the paid internship program is to provide top students on summer break the opportunity to contribute enhancements that make our software even better, which in the process helps them become more advanced programmers and developers, and to enhance their understanding of the financial markets.
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Tags: TT CampusConnect
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Informatica recognized TT as an
Innovation Award Finalist in the
Embedded Applications category. |
Last week Informatica hosted its annual customer conference, aptly named Informatica World 2014, where TT was recognized as an Innovation Award Finalist. I was lucky enough to attend the conference and accept the award on behalf of TT.
Although these types of vendor-sponsored awards are typically just marketing exercises for all involved, this was a different experience in my opinion. After speaking with various groups within Informatica, including their marketing team, as well as other conference attendees, it was obvious there was a genuine interest in and recognition of the innovation going into the development of TT’s recently unveiled next-generation trading platform.
I didn’t expect people to be very interested in us because we’re not a giant global enterprise like the typical Informatica customer. Informatica provides data integration software and services to a client roster that includes some of the most widely recognized companies in the world. Their products include the Ultra Messaging (UM) product suite, which we’re using in the new TT platform. In retrospect though, I guess the response shouldn’t have been so surprising since the conference was heavily focused on cloud and big data. In particular, many discussions focused on the challenges of getting real-time data into cloud-based data warehouses; we faced similar challenges when designing the new platform.
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Tags: Trade Execution
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Look for the hashtag #TTturns20 on Twitter
for more about our milestone anniversary. |
Today, as we celebrate 20 years of building trading software for our customers, I thought it was worth a look back at how the industry, and subsequently TT, has evolved over the past two decades and take a look at what’s ahead for our customers and TT.
On this date 20 years ago, we were founded in Frankfurt, Germany when nearly all trading on futures markets was conducted via open outcry. Access was extremely limited, and the ability for people to realize the benefits of listed futures, namely accurate price discovery and risk management, was limited to a select few.
When TT made Chicago its home a few years later, the floors of the Chicago Board of Trade and Chicago Mercantile Exchange roared. But as the trading community got comfortable with the concept of electronic trading, volume began to gradually migrate to the screen. A product we released in those early days, MD Trader®, had a huge impact because it was a radically different way to interface with the electronic market. It gave traders the ability to see and interact with the market with a level of confidence they hadn’t seen before and, in many ways, went hand-in-hand with the dramatic migration of volume to “the screens.”
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Tags: Algos & Spread Trading, Trade Execution, TT CampusConnect
Have you ever wanted to buy something in one location to sell it in another location at a higher price? Imagine buying gold on CME only to turn around and sell it on TOCOM at a higher price. This type of trade is known as geographical arbitrage.
While there is risk in every trade, geographical arbitrage is relatively low risk. The faster you can execute and the more alike the underlying products, the better the arb. Gold as an underlying makes for an almost perfect hedge, as the gold quality is identical. This is not true for most other commodities.
One major factor here is the two products are priced in different currencies. A currency conversion is required, and this conversion value is not static like some other conversion factors used for spreading. For example, in this spread, I will use a static conversion of 1 kilogram equal to approximately 32.15 troy ounces. This value will not change during my arb, but the dollar-to-yen ratio will.
Let’s begin by calculating how to set up this trade. I will convert the yen-to-dollar using 6J on CME and grams to troy ounces. Below is a table that shows this conversion to get TOCOM gold priced in U.S. dollars and troy ounces.
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Tags: Algos & Spread Trading, Charting, Trade Execution
