What is MiFID? Implications for Systematic Internalisers.

MiFID is "Markets in Financial Instruments Directive". It has 2 goals:

• foster competition and "level playing field" for Europe's trading venues
• provide protection for investors and consumers of financial services

It replaced the Investment Services Directive on 1 November 2007. An interesting aspect of MiFID is its rules for Systematic Internalisers (SIs); firms that execute orders from its clients against its own book, or against orders from other clients. MiFID treats these firms as virtual exchanges, subject to the same transparency requirements (pre-trade and post-trade).

GPU for Derivatives Pricing

Harnessing the graphics processing unit (GPU) for calculations is the key to financial calculation speedup. So says SciComp, a Texan company specialising in Monte Carlo pricing models. A GPU is multi-core parallel processor (currently up to 240 cores) that can run parallel applications many times faster than a computer's CPU. Unlock the power of NVIDIA CUDA architecture. Now.

Credit Crunch Technology

Siobhan Chapman of ComputerWorld reports on IT investment at what was formerly the world's fourth largest investment bank, Lehman Brothers. In the quarter ending 31 August 2008, Lehman spent $308million on technology and communications (compared to $282million in the same quarter of 2007). Lehmans was also involved in a number of high-profile IT projects such as Project Baikal in conjunction with LSE to provide dark liquidity pools which was due for completion Q1 2009.

Katy Ring, principal at analysts The Bathwick Group, is reported to have made the following observations on the impact of the credit crisis. "In the IT services sector the short to medium term impact is likely to be seen in a flight to providers with scale and automation that can migrate clients to standardised platforms to enable them to operate at lower cost."