Market surveillance needs permeate financial services firms from pre-trade to settlement, from trading via instant messenger services to exchanges and ECNs like never before in history. Every message, every trade, every conversation, every Tweet must be recorded, taped and downloaded into a database...

The Buck Stops At The Brokerage In Key West there is a famous cat show on the waterfront at sunset where the trainer (yes, cats can be trained) gives his performers their signals and they rush to slowly do his bidding. He says to them, often: "Hurry up, take your time." Such is the nature of...

Algorithms and high frequency trading have been blamed for everything from the credit crisis to the May 6th flash crash and high speed market abuse, and have attracted unwanted interest from regulators on both sides of the pond. But questions remain whether these tools are really computer models gone...

There is a new kind of emotional disorder going around the financial markets - the previously unnamed fear of something ominous now that new financial rules have been laid down. Let's call it regulation anxiety.

Regulation anxiety has led to all sorts of new types of behavior in banks...

Jeremy Grant, editor of FT Trading Room at the Financial Times, recently asked for explanations "on a postcard" about why speed is a force for good in financial markets, or put another way, to explain what the benefits are of...