News

Accountants, Prices and Upsidedown Elastic…

I am sure I am not the only one who has had to suffer the boredom of a economics lecture on price elasticity, but my interest in this old topic was sparked by an article by Tony Jackson in the FT on Monday, providing a very simple and clear explanation of how mark-to-market accounting (see earlier post) can conspire with leverage to turn price elasticity on its head, so the more something goes up in price, the more in demand it becomes…perhaps I should have paid more (or less?)…

CEP – Part of the technology furniture?

The CEP market is apparently maturing – don't miss this post "CEP: LaserDisc or DVD?" by Adam Honoré at Aite Group with an interesting view of the future of CEP technology.…

The Value in Product Control

Good post from Robert Peston on the BBC website on part that the Product Control Group did (or rather didn't?…) play in the problems at Lehman's, according to the official US bankruptcy report on Lehman's by Anton Valukas.The post highlights the report's findings that the Product Control Group did not have the quant experience to keep up with CDO trading desk.…

Data models are not what they used to be…

AIM have released the results from their 2009 survey on reference data management which is worth a look, particularly given the 2008 results are also shown for comparison. Seems like Mike Atkin and the EDM Council have their work cut out in getting the Semantics Repository adopted if the survey is anything to go by, with the number of institutions using standards-based data models having dropped significantly when comparing 2009 to 2008.…

Risk, Data Transparency and the MBS Market

I spent the morning yesterday over at the FIMA USA event in New York, and caught the panel discussion chaired by Neil Edelstein of GoldenSource. Stand out speakers were Amy Hawkins of BNY Mellon and John Bottega of the Federal Reserve.

Neil started the panel by asking the panel for their thoughts on the current drive to improve "data management for risk".…

How not to do marketing #1

I ran into this very funny post on the rebranding of Fortis into "ageas". Worth reading (and learning from it)! Also don't miss some of the comments posted for how other banks in the news could be renamed – join the debate and enter your suggestions too!…

One man’s speculation is another man’s insurance…

The current finanical crisis in Greece has prompted an outburst of entertaining discussion at the FT about CDS contracts, initiated by a feature article by Wolfgang Munchau who advocates that naked CDS contracts should be banned. The main argument used is that you should not be able to insure against a risk that you do not face e.g.…

Data Management Panel

Thomson Reuters held a panel event on data management at their London offices on Tuesday last week, with speakers from Barcap, LCH.Clearnet, DB, Mizuho and Citi. This event was held in follow up to their recent report “Beyond Golden Copy“. Below are some of my notes on the summary points the panelists made:

The Value of Data – Kris Bhattacharjee of Barcap said that there were currently two main drivers behind the perceived business value of data; i) Regulators are expecting more information, adding additional requirements and conducting more adhoc reporting requests.…

Beyond Golden Copy?

Interesting reading in a survey put together by Lepus and Thomson Reuters and publicised on Finextra this week. Summary findings:

Data management budgets are increasing, with 77% of firms intending to increase spend on data quality and consistency and 32% saying spend would increase significantly.…