Business Making Progress

Our 2012 Predictions: What to expect in capital markets

What will we see for capital markets in 2012?  The countdown to 2012 has begun. On the capital markets horizon is a great deal of change – no surprise to those following this year’s rollercoaster of rogue algorithms and regulation tension. So with no further ado, here are our capital markets predictions for 2012:

 1. Billion Dollar Blunder. At least one financial institution will take a billion dollar (or more) hit when a rogue algorithm goes wild. The algo will go into an infinite loop, taking on an irreversible and un-hedged position, which cannot be shut down. Losses will challenge those by human rogue traders, which banks and financial institutions will prevent from happening next year.

2. Occupy HFT. The public, government and regulators will start the "Occupy HFT" movement -- a popular uprising against the ultimate elite of those making money in this climate. Despite immense financial industry pressure, regulators in both the US and the EU will be panicked by investor and political disapproval of HFT and will rein it in with draconian rules and controls.

3. SEFs Spur Splash Crash. Swaps execution facilities (SEFs) will revolutionize OTC derivatives trading, enabling them to be traded electronically. This, in turn, will lead to increased risk of a cross-asset class swaps "splash crash" which will confound regulators, who have little understanding of these markets.

4. Global Regulation Rocks. Countries will finally realize that regulatory harmonization is a good thing and that individual self-interest is not. Banks and financial services firms will realize that they need to think like regulators, taking control of internal surveillance and compliance before regulators make them do it.

5. RICs Get Smarter. The RICs in BRICs are getting smart order routing and gearing up for an increase in algorithmic trading. This, coupled with looser regulations, will begin to attract regulatory arbitrageurs and Volcker Rule escapees.

6. The Wild East. The West's supremacy in financial markets will further decline as new trading regulations - the Volcker Rule in the US and MiFID in Europe - create a surge of regulatory arbitrage favoring more lightly regulated geographies such as Russia and China. Wall Street and the City of London will lose human and financial capital as a result.

7. Financial Terrorism. An exchange or trading destination will be hacked by financial terrorists intent on manipulating markets for political gain. This will lead exchanges and ECNs to add more stringent monitoring and market surveillance capabilities.

8. Head in the Clouds. Explosive growth in foreign exchange trading and SEFs means that participating firms will require complex hosted solutions. Even the smallest FX broker needs aggregation and pricing services which require a big technology footprint. SEFs present new challenges as swaps markets attract algorithms and require surveillance.

9. Crime & Punishment. Regulators are cracking down hard on financial fraud and market manipulation and they will bring in some big fish in 2012. Prosecutions and punishments will increase in size and in impact.

There you have it – nine predictions for capital markets in 2012. What are your thoughts on these predictions, and have we missed any? Comment below, or tell us on Twitter at @DrJohnBates or @ProgressSW.

Merry Christmas! Wait...we need to enjoy Turkey day first - Christmas Creep and the supply chain

For those of us in the United States, we have already been bombarded with holiday promotions and I am not speaking of the Thanksgiving celebration but the Christmas one. Many have deemed this "Christmas creep." (yes it has a wikipedia page...but what doesn't these days?). I am used to the Christmas marketing efforts to start after Thanksgiving, granted it usually started about 5 minutes after the last piece of turkey has been polished off. As a kid, I also felt that somehow the Macy's parade was the official sign that you could transistion from Fall and Halloween/Thanksgiving to Winter and the holiday season. Alas now, at the end of October you start seeing the appearance of Christmas - decorations being sold, the red cups at Starbucks and even Christmas window displays in stores. I knew I was in trouble when I heard Christmas music being pumped over a speaker system at some retail location.

So what does this mean for your supply chain? First of all, retailers tend to start stocking for the Christmas season in September sometimes earlier, so if their planning and forecasts are decent (that is sometimes a stretch) they will have the appopriate amounts and mix of inventory. Rather than trying to flush out the excess inventory as Christmas gets closer or...gasp...discount post Christmas to clear out inventory, the Christmas Creep allows for retailers to extend the window they have to move merchandise. Of course the supply chain needs to be flexible if demand outpaces the inventory, granted on some products this will not be possible if production times are long. From a store shelf perspective, the Christmas creep might not be a bad thing - Christmas provides a greater array of merchandise then either Halloween or Thanksgiving. While Halloween is almost on par with Christmas when it comes to decoration needs, it pales in comparison to the array of merchandise Christmas related. For a retailer this ensures store shelves will be flush with goodies to be purchased.

The supply chain issue that is sometimes overlooked by retailers pushing Christmas Creep is the impact on the consumer, the source of demand. Clearly the desire to extend the Christmas shopping season is to start the shopping engine sooner, get consumers to seperate themselves with cash early and often...but will a longer shopping cycle just render the shoppers numb as well as "train" consumers to ignore some of the marketing and promotional efforts that occur in October? Do consumers enter the holiday season with a set budget and whether they spend it starting in October or November or December 22nd, they will spend that amount. Will consumers expect to get greater discounts as the season draws on, especially if retailers start promoting Christmas season in October and leveraging discounting earlier and earlier into the season to draw customers into their establishments? Basically having an arms race amongst retailers - who can capture the consumers faster than the next - with the weapons of choice being promotions.

So as your push back from the table after your second serving of turkey, think about the fact you should have been making some Christmas purchases since October!

Happy Thanksgiving to all our American readers and friends. To the rest of you, how is your Christmas shopping going?

Computerized Compliance: Savior or Intruder?

Several top executives of UBS, one of the world’s biggest banks, resigned in disgrace this fall following the announcement that a very junior rogue trader in the London office had managed to lose the astounding sum of $2 billion.

Government regulators had already been pushing banks to make sure they knew their risks and commitments at all times. Clearly, UBS didn’t have the automated systems in place that would have alerted higher-ups to the exposure. Some critics asked how an individual ETF trader could have authorization to take such a huge risk. Presumably UBS had set limits for each level of trader, but a flaw in the system let the man keep increasing his exposure.

Automating compliance in the world banking systems should be a no brainer. With the velocity and volume of transactions, only computers can make the trades, and only computers can monitor them. Some regulators buy real-time market surveillance monitoring from Progress Software, the same company that provides real-time trading software to investors (and the sponsor of this blog).

But computerized compliance can be a two-edged sword. It can be so restrictive that traders can’t do their jobs of creatively managing risk. 

And when corporate managers start pushing their CIOs to monitor compliance in other areas they can get into difficult areas of employee privacy. MIT research fellow Michael Shrage, recently wrote in Harvard Business Review that, “very few CIOs want to become the ‘Chief Interrogation Officer’ or ‘Chief Invasiveness Officer.’ But those are roughly the roles they're being asked to assume as the enterprise dependence on their technologies expands.”  He points to requirements to monitor e-mails and text messages for disclosure of secrets or terms of harassment.

Most companies make it clear to employees that they should have no expectation of privacy for anything they do on a corporate computer or corporate network. And workers are coming to understand that anything bad that they say about their companies on their private Facebook pages or Twitter feeds could get them fired.

The issues of compliance and privacy are becoming more difficult as companies increasingly allow employees to use their own technology, such as iPads and iPhones, on the corporate network. It’s very easy to accidentally write an intemperate e-mail or forward an inappropriate picture with your corporate account rather than your private HotMail.

The ability to monitor all kinds of electronic activity by employees makes it tempting for companies to do so. But they need to carefully consider exactly what they want to monitor. And they should let employees know the boundaries.

Some companies have adopted loose guidelines. Microsoft’s unofficial policy on employee blogging is “don’t be stupid.” But with Millennials entering the workforce, understanding of what is “stupid” may be lacking. Someone has to warn them that lines that were clever on their semester-abroad blog might be offensive in a work Wiki.

Computerized compliance is a necessity in many functions. But companies need to consider carefully what they monitor and what they do with the information they gather.

Can market surveillance help to keep traders on track?

"According to TABB Group new compliance costs are indicated at between 512 and 732 million euro, with ongoing costs between 312 and 586 million euros.  But while regulators are still determining what regulation will look like, the need for market surveillance is undiminished. Traders made about 13.3 billion euros ($18.2 billion) from market manipulation and insider dealing on EU equity markets in 2010, according to an EU commission study.  With some arguing that firms can only do so much to survey markets themselves as trades cross multiple brokers and gateways, the panel discussed the need for fragmented market data to be brought together in a consolidated tape and surveillance performed at an aggregate market-wide level."

This is just an excerpt from a recent post to our Event Processing Blog by Richard Bentley, VP Capital Markets, Progress Software. Can market surveillance help to keep traders on track? Read the entire post.

Plan Do Check Act - getting closer to closing the loop in Supply Chain

I have been fortunate enough to have had worked for some incredible visionaries and leaders during my career. One such person is Sanjiv Sidhu, one of the founders of i2 Technologies. I learned a tremendous amount from my time spent at i2 and much was gained from the passion, intelligence and vision exhibited by Sanjiv. One simple, yet powerful, mantra Sanjiv preached was the notion of “Plan – Do – Check – Act.”

Granted this was not original to Sanjiv but rather a process by which companies can leverage as they strive for continual improvements. The beauty, as in many things, is in the simplicity of this saying for supply chains. The need to be able to plan well – how will I determine my end goal, allocated resources, make investments and distribute my assets. Then being able to do – execute towards the end goal, in a expeditious and profitable manner. Once the execution begins the need to constantly monitor how the process is trending – establishes milestones or alerts to indicate whether or not I will be able to achieve the goals I set. And finally to be capable to act – if and when events impact my ability to achieve my goals, can I take the appropriate actions to re-sequence my supply chain and get back on track. The simple process of PDCA allows enterprises and their supply chains to have a constant feedback loop on where they stand with regards to completing the goals they established.

 When it comes to supply chain management we have spent much treasure and effort in giving solutions for planning and doing – just take a look at the landscape of solution providers that allow you to plan and then execute. The ability to do the check and act has not been as evident within supply chain management. I realize vendors and service providers have tried to bring true visibility to end to end supply chain processes – with minimal success.

Today with flexible applications, the cloud, greater mobility and other advances with our systems and architecture we are closer to being able to finally round out PDCA. As we start to have true extended supply chain visibility coupled with complex event processing – tied to business process management – supply chains can truly check their process, understand the impact of events and act or re-sequence to ensure their end goals are met.

We are getting closer to true closed loop supply chain management.