By Mike Powell, CEO, Rapid Addition As we pointed out in our last blog, after an extended period of reticence – based mainly on sensitivities around latency, security, and privacy – capital markets trading firms are finally joining the rest of the digital world by exploring how cloud can help their business and streamline or […]
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By Mike Powell, CEO, Rapid Addition The structure of capital markets and how they are traded have, to a large extent, been shaped through the technology adopted by market participants and service providers over the past two decades. And while some firms remain cutting edge, many are left operating legacy infrastructure characterised by high cost […]
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In Miguel de Cervantes’ seminal 17th Century novel, a delusional middle-aged man named Alonso Quixano becomes obsessed with chivalry and believes he is a knight named Don Quixote. Accompanied by his loyal sidekick, Sancho Panza, Don Quixote sets out on a series of misadventures, perhaps the best known of which is tilting at windmills in […]
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Rapid Addition was in South Africa last week when CEO Mike Powell and Chairman Kevin Houstoun caught up with RA’s Johannesburg-based head of MEA, Melvyn Plumridge, to visit customers and attend the JSE’s SA Trade Connect Event in Cape Town. As well as being a great opportunity to catch up with clients, colleagues, and industry […]
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In this article, orginally published in Best Execution, our CEO, Mike Powell, looks at an emerging approach to making better trading technology decisions. Capital markets institutions face a heady mix of geopolitical, economic, and structural challenges as they consider their strategic growth plans. With Europe slipping into recession, the Ukraine conflict driving up energy prices, […]
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Running a sell-side trading desk is a challenging business. Activity is highly regulated, customers are demanding, and competitors more than happy to take your place. Sales traders and execution teams are under intense pressure to update clients on the status of large open orders, explain why a trade may have been rejected or remains unexecuted, […]
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Crypto currencies have been making headlines again over the last couple of weeks thanks to Chinese regulators banning financial institutions and payment companies from providing cryptocurrency transaction services, while also warning investors against speculative crypto trading. Sentiment was further undermined by Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, reversing a previous decision that his company would accept Bitcoin […]
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I was lucky enough to join Nomura’s Japanese equity desk in London as my first job out of university. It was the late 80s, the Nikkei 225 was soon to hit an all-time high of nearly 39,000, and the big 4 Japanese brokerages of Nomura, Yamaichi, Daiwa and Nikko had become international financial powerhouses. However, […]
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Discussing the state of capital markets tech In the unusual world we find ourselves, catching up with industry peers via Zoom or Teams seems to be the only way to compare notes these days. It was great then that Toby Babb pulled a group of us together on Fintech Focus TV for an in-depth […]
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Running trading infrastructure in large sell-side firms is a tough gig. Not only are you responsible for perhaps the most business-critical part of your organisation, but even the smallest outage or change management error is highly visible to your clients. Dropping the ball can have significant economic consequences, not least thanks to an increasingly […]
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