Category: Real Life

Thanks to the Hoboken411 weblog, I’ve learned why all the stores here were closed (and water is flying off the food store shelves!).

We’ve had a water main break just south of here in Jersey City. Comments there say it was caused by accident while construction workers were fiddling around the pipe. *sigh* oh well…

This should be an interesting few hours. Argh. I suppose I could goto work if I want to goto the bathroom. ;)

OK, out of the gutter folks (for those who understood that reference in the title). I don’t normally talk about work, but I feel it important to my fellow MystBloggers and others in the Myst/Uru community to explain why I’ve been (mostly) out of touch since late March.

It’s no secret – to those who know me – that I work in the Financial Sector. That’s about as much as you’ll get out of me too, since the ethics contract is a bit vague regarding what I can actually say; But in this case it does not matter, and you’ll find most of the following in search engines anyway (though not as simplified).

Pretty much every company in that field the past few months are working on the same thing – a major rule shift called RegNMS (Full name: Regulation National Market System). The primary goal of this change is relatively simple – protecting investors by ensuring that every order requested is filled (traded) at the best price.

From Anywhere (at least in the US I think).

Right, I’ll let that sink in a few minutes…

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Anyway, the implementation of this is also relatively simple – sort of:

1) Seven major trading centers become the ‘backbone’ of a distributed network for passing Trade Orders around. A sort of meta-trading center.

2) Everyone else who wants to be involved in trading has to connect to this backbone, at one or more of the trading centers.

3) Orders that come in to this network get matched and filled at the best prices – possibly from several sources, depending on the nature of the order.

There are, of course, a ‘few’ technical challenges involved here. There’s going to be a hell of a lot more message traffic; There are discussions saying everything between 4x and 10x today’s current volumes. The number of trades (both overall and from the perspective of an individual company) is probably going to skyrocket. And no one is quite sure yet how this will pan out for the markets and/or the companies who are ‘listed’ in any of the various exchanges.

Another pause for those who are still following me, to let that sink in too…

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So, yeah, I’m working on the setup and monitoring of what’s basically a moving target. We will all know for certain in about a month – the first 100 stocks will go ‘live’ (on the main rule I described above) July 9th IIRC, with everybody on it by October.

So if you thought I was a recluse the past three months, just wait. Comments welcome as always (in particular corrections to my bumbling, rambling post); I’m shutting off the auto-close of old posts for awhile.

–TSK

Good Lord, its been too long. Sorry about that, I’m having ‘fun’ with work again.

Lots to update regarding just about every catagory, so will be posting specific updates through the next few days.

*wave*
–TSK

Argh. Got suckered in by Google’s prank today – Google TiSP (BETA).

In defense, I had just gotten up and had been doing semi-mindless chores to get myself back in gear. And the pic did spark my curiosity enough (in a ‘what the?’ kind of way) to click further.

People are getting better at this, admittedly. Very professional; Hats off to Google on this one. Now I’m waiting to see if SL will do a similar trick (perhaps not since its Sunday).

And on a similar note, I’d recommend taking a peek at a show coming up tonight on Science Channel I think. Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real Should be a hoot, I’ll probably record it.

–TSK