ETNA Software. Financial technology insights

Markets Weather The Storm, Show Recovery

The major U.S. Indexes all posted significant gains from the previous week’s close. Some Asian markets also advanced, but the Shanghai Composite and Hang Seng both closed with losses. European indexes still faltered, but were up from the previous week. The end of the week saw the stocks of certain luxury purveyors like Tiffany and Co. and Coach posting healthy gains. Even after dramatic losses and unpredictable volatility, history shows us that the market will usually right itself within a few weeks or months.

Warren Buffet delivered a much-needed vote of confidence in Bank of America by announcing that his company, Berkshire Hathaway, would make a 5 billion dollar investment in Bank of America in exchange for preferred shares paying a 6% per annum dividend for the next ten years. Buffet also received the option to purchase as many as 700 million shares in BofA at just over $7.00 per share until 2021. Bank of America has been working to raise capital in the face of falling stock prices and nervous investors. A slew of litigation prompted by the mortgage crisis has been dragging down the bank’s stability. (more…)

Market Deja Vu (Financial Week in Review, Aug. 15-19, 2011)

Break out the chocolate bars; it’s been another rough week for the markets. The major indexes on the NYSE all closed lower on Friday, and slipped further in after-hours trading. They were not alone. Markets all around the globe fell this week. It’s almost as though the week before last is repeating itself.

Trading started off strong on Monday, after a promising rally at the end of the previous week, thanks to news of mergers and acquisitions and hopes for a resolution to the debt crisis in Europe. The worst of the decline began on Thursday and stocks experienced another round of sell-offs before the close of the Markets on Friday. Even Blue Chip stocks such as Google, Apple, Verizon and General Electric were down at the close of trading. Hewlett-Packard stock sunk like a rock following its announcement that it may sell-off the PC, smartphone, and tablet portions of its business. HP also agreed to buy U.K. software giant Autonomy Corp. for a reported $10 billion. HP shares sank 20% after the announcement, dragging the Dow down with it. HP’s losses account for 45 points of the Dow’s decline. Meanwhile, computer hardware manufacturer, AMD, gained 3.28%, while rival, Intel, dropped 3%. (more…)

It was the Best of Times, It was the Worst of Times… (Financial Week in Review, August 8-12, 2011 + Update)

August 15th marks the 40th anniversary of the end of the gold standard in United States currency. On August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon announced that the U.S. would no longer trade dollars for gold. Forty years later, the gold price is $1765.30, after hitting a record high of $1,817.60 on August 11.

DOLLAR DIPS

“France…rolled with exceeding smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it.” – Charles Dickens. Those words, from “A Tale of Two Cities,” could have been written today, and not merely about France.

The 40th anniversary coincides with data showing the U.S. dollar lost nearly a point today. The Swiss franc, a currency which has reduced its gold backing in recent years, has seen its value sliding for days and has lost roughly 11 percent overall. The Yen dropped as well, but the euro rose 1.4 percent. (more…)

What Goes Up Must Come Down (Financial Week in Review, Aug. 1-5, 2011)

The closing bell brought an end to a dramatic week in the markets. Thursday was the worst day for stocks since the beginning of the financial crisis. The Dow Jones Industrial Average took a 512-point nosedive, and concerns about the European debt crisis triggered a large-scale sell-off. This news came as a surprise to many analysts who expected the economy to continue recovering. As Friday dawned, the sell-off spread to markets worldwide.

However, there are already signs of recovery. Blue chip stocks, although still finishing low, experienced an upswing on Friday thanks to news that the national unemployment rate fell one-tenth of one percent to 9.1%. Corporations such as Costco have remained strong, rising 0.30%. (more…)

Types of Trading Solutions and What They Mean to You

Electronic Trading Platforms and Tools

Traders use a combination of several tools in their daily routine. These include charting software, pattern-recognition software, risk-analysis tools, currency converters, simulators, etc. These tools can be used independently or can be integrated into a custom online trading platform to save time and effort.

Electronic Trading platforms, such as ETNA Trader, are a more sophisticated type of solution which can be custom built from the ground up to satisfy the needs of the specific broker/dealer or enterprise who will be using it. They are usually complete solutions which can incorporate any tools that the broker wishes to use. Online trading platforms offer the capability to view market prices and issue trades while incorporating many other features. Most trading platforms contain, (at the very least), charting software which can be programmed by the user to specify price, volume, and other deciding factors.

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Trading socialized

Social media are here to stay. Period. There is no way you can avoid Twitter and Facebook and Linkedin and Foursquare and more and more. Your friends checked-in in a bar and one of them was crowned a Mayor; your @girlfriend bought lettuce; the @person-you-do-not-even-know twitted about a terrible hangover and Lady Gaga released a new single on Facebook. This is fun, no doubt about that. There is business for social media. There is business for celebutante‘s. There is one question left – how can all that become useful for a trader? Could it be implemented in asset management software?

Twitter has become a dustbin of emotions. Emotions which people cannot control and which are caused by some real-life events. Should it be an act of terrorism or an experience with glossy iPad2. This is all real-life and it influences trades just as the acts proposed and natural calamities.

Now imagine that you could see the most real-time news possible – not from the news agencies – but from real eye-witnesses? What if you could understand the sentiment of the news, understand their volume, evaluate the authenticity of news and then make a trading decision on that signals? Will that affect your trading?

Would you want to wait for an official news source to find the very same information in the very same source and make it available for everyone? I wouldn’t. I would take this all by myself and be the first one to use the competitive edge and earn, earn and earn more.

Think about how social media could affect your day trading. Gain advantage and gain profit!

White Paper: SaaS & SOA in Retail Banking

Global challenges force financial organizations to seek a new technology foundation for business. The combination of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provides ultimate expandability cost effectively and unlimbers organizations for SaaS rapid change.

ETNA has introduced an effective way for retail banks to design and redesign business processes using SaaS & SOA in a relatively short time.

A more detailed description of the system is available in the whitepaper.

You can download it by clicking this link – ETNA SaaS & SOA in Retail Banking.

You can request more detailed information about how the banks can maximum usefully use SaaS & SOA technologies by calling us at +1 (718) 717 2700 or by sending us a note from the Contact us page.

White Paper: Silverlight Out of Browser

This whitepaper describes programming and design aspects for installation and customization of Silverlight functioning out of browser.

With the advent of the latest Silverlight business application-focused enhancements, large-scale interfaces and associated tooling provided by Visual Studio and Expression Studio, a developer is in a position to build this type of application rapidly and enjoy benefits of Web delivery and deployment.

To learn more about Silverlight out of browser click the following link – ETNA Silverlight out of browser.

You can request more detailed information concerning our work on Sliverlight and the way it is used in electronic trading applications by calling us at +1 (718) 717-2700 or by sending us a note from the Contact us page.

Choosing OMS

«OMS» or Order Management System is an application developed to execute orders in the fastest and the most efficient way. Order execution is not the only purpose of an OMS, of course, but the most important one. While a lot of worthy OMSs operate in the market, none of them fits all possible requirements hundred- per- cent. What issues should be taken into consideration when a person takes a decision on buying an OMS? This article recounts about that in particular. (more…)

Grocery Versus your Hotbed

You badly need tomatoes for your ‘Bloody Mary’ today. This is an issue. You can go to a grocery and order them there or build your own hotbed, buy seeds and start growing.

This is the choice you have to make when starting on something that requires a couple of lines of code. Or couple of million lines of code. Do that in-house. On a hotbed. Or outsource to the grocery. (more…)

How to Create a Successful Trading Software

Modern society could hardly be imagined without IT. The Stock Exchange as a part of modern business has not missed the unique opportunity to utilize this new medium being anxious to boost and facilitate trading processes. It goes without saying, speed and quality are crucial in financial world. To meet these requirements modern software vendors do their best making the most out of cutting-edge technologies and drawing on highly experienced trading software developers. (more…)