Technology & Finance

Thursday, April 30, 2009

America's Pig Farm Related Epidemic Kills 18,000 a Year

Am I missing something here? Back in March, Nicholas Kristoff of The Times wrote about a flesh eating bacteria resistant to antibiotics, MRSA, that appears linked to the heavy med dosing used in huge pig farms.

“MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) sometimes arouses terrifying headlines as a “superbug” or “flesh-eating bacteria.” The best-known strain is found in hospitals, where it has been seen regularly since the 1990s, but more recently different strains also have been passed among high school and college athletes. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that by 2005, MRSA was killing more than 18,000 Americans a year, more than AIDS…

“So what’s going on here, and where do these antibiotic-resistant infections come from? Probably from the routine use — make that the insane overuse — of antibiotics in livestock feed. This is a system that may help breed virulent “superbugs” that pose a public health threat to us all. That’ll be the focus of my next column, on Sunday.”

Is anybody paying attention or is the media mob just focused on the latest?

Hanging out in London

Looking for something to eat after a visit to the British Museum? Just around the corner from the front entrance is Il Castelletto, a lovely small Italian restaurant with charming proprietors who will make you feel as if you are a neighborhood regular on the first visit, without being intrusive. Ok, without being obnoxious.  Excellent food, reasonable prices, about a dozen tables.

17 Bury Place 020 74052232
Email

Summer time drinks.

The Montague on the Gardens. A recently refurbished hotel on Montague Street near Russell Square, it has a wonderful garden in back. The sculptures scattered around the grounds are best enjoyed over a G&T from the back deck, although the bar looks a cozy spot for cooler weather. Service is a little slow, but if you get up and look for more the pace picks up a bit.

Art and drinks

Chez Gerard, in the area around Sotheby’s, features a long zinc bar, a reasonably priced menu, and at least a couple of stools for someone exhausted from looking at art and in need of a glass of wine
31 Dover Street, Mayfair

Smart Risk Management -- World Health Organization

Want to see intelligent risk management in operation? Dial up the World Health Organization press conference 29 April on CNN or some other site and try to recall any recent political or financial press conference with this level of calm, smart presentation of complex information. .

Dr. Margaret Chan, director general of the organization, took questions from a group of reporters representing news outlets from around the globe and answered them directly. The reporters seemed well informed on the issues and asked intelligent questions, which is not always the case in issues of finance and politics.

As The Times reported:

“Some elected officials have begun to question the decision to leave the borders open. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano was grilled by senators on Wednesday who asked whether her agency was doing enough to stop the virus from spreading from Mexico. The senators, including John McCain of Arizona and Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, asked several times why the administration had decided against closing the border and banning travel to Mexico.”
They should watch the WHO presentation – they could learn the answers and take a lesson or two about how to handle challenging problems.

This sort of stupid grandstanding, which we have come to expect from politicians, was completely absent from the WHO conference where Dr. Chan and two colleagues handed off questions to each other with no signs of camera hogging.

Near the end, a reporter struggled to ask Chan what the WHO was doing to secure its own staff. On ce she understood she explained this is the WHO’s business, that it takes protective measures but it won’t flee from global health problems – this is its business. And she reminded the reporters, and the world, that people, especially in poor countries, face medical crises such as HIV AIDS and malaria, which are regularly killing far more people than the swine flu.

This presentation—I almost wrote performance but that doesn’t do it justice—was the most impressive I have seen in ages. I stayed with the entire press conference marveling at how well informed public officials and educated reporters can provide valuable information. The followup commentary on CNN was back to normal drivel—they should have rerun the press conference instead.

Once this pandemic is over, could the WHO lend some of its experts to the FSA, SEC and treasury departments around the world?

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Chi-X Increases Capacity, Announces Dark Pool

Chi-X Europe Limited, operator of the largest pan-European equity multilateral trading facility (MTF), has increased the capacity or its core matching engine to handle 225,000 messages per second with full redundancy. With an average internal latency of 350 microseconds and a co-location latency of 400 microseconds, the response times and capacity of Chi-X Europe’s technology are among the fastest in the industry.

“We have witnessed an explosion in demand for order messaging capacity, and the scalability of our business model has allowed us to efficiently increase our system’s capacity from 30,000 messages per second when we launched two years ago to the 225,000 messages per second available today,” said Hirander Misra, chief operating officer of Chi-X Europe. “While we fully intend to continue to innovate to meet our participants’ needs and further increase capacity as necessary, it is interesting to note that the message capacities of some of the incumbent exchanges still remain at levels lower than our initial launch capabilities.”

Chi-X has also announced its intention to launch the “Chi-Delta” (Dark Electronic Liquidity Trading Application) dark book, aiming for Q2 2009, subject to standard regulatory approvals. Dark pools have run into all sorts of problems with the FSA which is either abysmally ignorant or prefers not to understand how they operate. Abysmal ignorance seems to be the leading contender among people who know the regulator.

Chi-X Europe currently offers its trading participants the ability to use hidden order types in its visible order book, subject to meeting MiFID’s Large in Scale requirements. Chi-Delta, which has been developed in line with MiFID requirements, will be a separate, non-displayed, reference-pegged order book for orders that do not meet the Large in Scale order size requirements.

Prices on Chi-Delta will initially use the Primary Best Bid and Offer (PBBO) for reference pricing, though European Best Bid and Offer (EBBO) is expected to become the source of reference prices at a later date.

NYFIX has had to redesign its matching to meet objections from the FSA. A number of senior market participants, speaking at several conferences over the last few months, have bemoaned the term “dark pools” to describe anonymous matching, since regulators, and politicians, think it sounds sinister.

It will be interesting to see how long to take Chi-X to win approval.

“Many of our trading participants have expressed interest in Chi-X Europe adopting a dual market structure that includes a market for speedy price discovery and a market for non-displayed crossing,” said COO Misra, “We developed Chi-Delta with this in mind, with a goal of helping participants minimise market impact by potentially trading with a natural counterparty and limiting information leakage. We continue to look for ways to innovate and we are delighted to provide further choice for our participants through the introduction of our dark order book.”

London's Baikal Goes with BNP

The LSE’s Baikal has chosen BNP Paribas Securities Services for back office outsourcing and settlement services for the Baikal smart order routing platform and dark pool order book.

John Wilson, CEO Baikal said: “Baikal is set to become a major platform for trading of European stocks and with BNP Paribas providing us with operational post-trade services we are confident we have a solid foundation on which to launch and build our business.”

§ Syndicate

• RSS 2.0
• Atom