jimn's blog

Unfortunately, Skype was likely too valuable a service and too valuable a property to languish under the clear lack of strategy being exhibited by eBay of late.
Private Equity announced a deal to acquire a majority interest in Skype as reported in the Wall Street Journal.

Security Industry News interviewed me in my role as America's Regional Co-chair of FIX Protocol Ltd. on the upcoming Options Symbology Initiative (OSI), the long overdue upgrade to options symbology within US markets. My compliments to my former employer, The Options Clearing Corporation for taking on the role of the bad guy to force the industry to do something that should have been done many years ago.

The listed derivatives industry market structure, regulated but still efficient and effective, survived the global financial crisis relatively intact. The overall banking industry did not fair as well. Yet, we are seeing moves afoot in the US to change the regulatory regime for listed derivatives.

Here is a link to the reform white paper from the White House http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/reform.pdf

The white paper is interesting in how much is left unchanged – on a net basis there are still about the same number of regulatory entities, despite some merging of responsibilities on the bank side. It is not unreasonable to conclude that this is a typical response to a crisis as opposed to some radical major reform and restructuring. Alas, it harkens back to Sarbanes-Oxley layering of regulations as opposed to restructuring.

It looks like Sprint Nextel will be carrying the Pre from Palm. AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson said in a WSJ article yesterday that AT&T would likely carry the Pre after the exclusivity period with Sprint ends. In the article Stephenson was defending the AT&T Network, although anyone that uses a smartphone or a 3G wireless for their PC in a major metropolitan area during the day realize that the smartphones are crushing the network.

My friend Bill Nichols, Program Director, Securities Processing Automation at SIIA/FISD and a very high bandwidth guy located this article on the web that encapsulates my experiences with standards over the past thirty years. Simple de facto standards are far more successful then de jeure or top down design driven standards. Although this article by John F. Sowa does not mention FIX, it really captures why FIX has been successful and why other protocols have not achieved the same level of success.

The Law of Standards

I think we are starting to come to the realization that the use of XML for real time messaging comes at too great a cost. At one time the thought was that bandwidth and processing power increases would overcome the inefficiencies in parsing XML and in the verbosity of XML messages. What has happened instead as the availability of bandwidth and processing have increased the volume of messages has increased as has the demand for much lower latency. This trend does not bode well for XML.