Sometimes it helps to search for certain key phrases among the many news sources that are indexed by the Google News search service. A search for the term "Lars Toomre" on Friday October 12th 2007 reveals that Mr. Toomre was quoted by eFinancialNews in an October 1st 2007 story entitled Dow Jones’ News Feed Makes Headlines.

During the past few weeks, Lars Toomre has been working from a client site (a top-ten hedge fund by size located in Manhattan) together with some members of the great team from G2 Systems, LLC. As a result of the long hours completing this particular project and the additional hours commuting, there has been little time left for writing and then updating this website on a regular basis.

In the financial markets, the week that includes July 4th normally is relatively quiet with many people away for at least some portion of the time. That hardly was the case this year at Toomre Capital Markets. This past week three incoming contacts reminded Lars why it is so important to somehow create time for sharing his thoughts and observations, despite all else that may be going on.

Back on July 27th 2006, Toomre Capital Markets LLC ("TCM") highlighted Reuters' pursuit of "machine readable news" for algorithmic trading applications. Reuters eventually released two products in December 2006 aimed at the direct feed of economic statistics and company earnings information into quantitative algorithms.

On March 5th 2007, Regulation National Market System ("Reg NMS") will go into effect for the United States stock markets. Designed to even the playing field between U.S. stock exchanges and rival electronic trading platforms, these regulations require one exchange to route customer orders to other trading venues that display a superior price execution. The goal is to ensure that customers get 'best execution' on each and every one of their stock and equity option transactions, while eliminating the current practice of 'trade-throughs' (ie executing an order at an inferior price than that currently available nationally) and encouraging the greater use of limit orders.

Late on Friday March 2nd 2007, the New York Stock Exchange ("NYSE") asked the Securities and Exchange Commission for a partial delay in adopting the new Reg NMS rules with certain alternative display facilities such as Direct Edge, LavaFlow Inc., and Track Data Securities Corp. The NYSE also apparently needs more time to connect with the International Securities Holdings Inc., which is in the midst of rolling out its equities trading. None of those trading platforms are plugged into the broadly used Intermarket Trading System, which is what the NYSE and other major exchanges use to route orders. There is no indication yet of how the S.E.C. will react to yet another request for a delay.

In response to yesterday's post Event Driven Architecture - Event Processing Moving Forward?, several other sources of information on Event Driven Architecture have been highlighted. One is a new blog by the leaders of the Apama team over at Progress Software. Another is the web site of the Aite Group.

Another reader suggested that Toomre Capital Markets LLC ("TCM") also highlight the other major vendors of software for an Event Driven Architecture. In addition to Streambase Systems (whom we mentioned is a client of TCM), other significant players in the event processing space include: TIBCO BusinessEvents, Progress Apama, Coral8, Aptsoft, Aleri, Kaskad, KX and Vhayu.

At present, the two largest vendors in the financial services vertical are probably TIBCO and Progress Apama. However, one must always take vendor reports of number of customers with a grain of salt in the financial services space since so many financial firms request anonymity as a condition of their contractual arrangements.

No doubt there are pluses and minuses to each one of these respective vendors. However, Toomre Capital Markets LLC would like to reemphasize that leading financial firms need consider the competitive advantage that Event Driven Architecture provides in the move to real-time (and continuous) trading, near real-time Enterprise Risk Management

If the reader has any questions, please feel free to contact Toomre Capital Markets LLC as indicated below. Reader comments and thoughts are welcome.