Rap Tap on Wood

Added on by C. Maoxian.

From Born to Dance ... 1936 ... original title of the movie was Great Guns. Has one of my favorite verses (so many I love from Cole Porter though):

When ev'ry meal you take
Is made of milk and honey,
When ev'ry stock you stake
Is making mints of money,
When ev'ry heart you break
Is such a cinch, it's funny,
Careful, sonny,
Rap-tap, rap-tap, rap-tap-tap, rap-a-tap-tap....
Ra-ap tap on wood

Other songs in the musical that I enjoy include Love Me, Love My Pekingese ("'Spite of your antipathies") and I've Got You Under My Skin (best version done by old Blue Eyes many years later).

List of Stock Exchanges and Dark Pools

Added on by C. Maoxian.

List of US Stock Exchanges:

List of Dark Pools:

Independent dark pools

Broker-dealer-owned dark pools

Consortium-owned dark pools

  • BIDS Trading - BIDS ATS
  • LeveL ATS

Exchange-owned dark pools

Other dark pools

Dark pool aggregators

  • Fidessa - Spotlight
  • Bloomberg Tradebook
  • SuperX+ – Deutsche Bank
  • ASOR – Quod Financial
  • Progress Apama
  • ONEPIPE – Weeden & Co. & Pragma Financial
  • Xasax Corporation
  • Crossfire – Credit Agricole Cheuvreux

Painfully Simple, Painfully Fair

Added on by C. Maoxian.

From a December 1999 article in Wall Street + Technology titled The top 10 financial technology innovators of the decade

Joshua Levine The Matchmaker
If there's a single person that revolutionized the equity markets in the 1990s, it's Joshua Levine, creator of the Island ECN--a computerized trading system that automatically matches buyers and sellers.
Island is an outgrowth of The Watcher, a front-end trading system into the Nasdaq system that Levine had first created, which provides day traders with direct electronic access into the SOES and SelectNet systems. Island, however, developed in January 1996, is widely considered a more significant innovation.
"This was probably the most influential change in the markets since they did away with fixed-commission rates in the 70s," says Mark Friedfertig, CEO of Broadway Trading, a leading day-trading firm that has used Island since January 1996.
As Friedfertig recalls it, Island started as an internal electronic communications; network (ECN), which Friedfertig and others say led to the SEC's order handling rules issued in January 1997. The rules force Nasdaq market makers to post their customers' limit orders in their Nasdaq quote or send the order onto the newly created ECNs.
According to Peter Stem, the Chief Technology Officer of Datek Online, Island is successful because "the Island ECN is just painfully simple, it's painfully fair, there are few rules because it's very straight forward-buyers and sellers meet, a trade is won, end of story," says Stem, who met Levine when both were freshman at Carnegie Mellon University. Levine reportedly left school and headed for Wall Street where he teamed up with Datek Online co-founder Jeffrey Citron. Noticing that there were "cross markets" going on in Nasdaq-when the price someone is willing to pay to buy stock is higher than the price someone else is offering to sell at-Levine wrote a program to track how many times a day this was happening. 'Josh said, this is ridiculous that trades aren't taking place when you have customers that are willing to pay higher to buy than customers willing to sell stock," recalls Friedfertig. "He created a way for customers to trade with other customers as opposed to just trading with market makers," says Friedfertig.
Levine spread the gospel by publishing the Island API (application programming interface) on his own personal Web site, www.josh.com. Today, Island has grown to become the second most popular ECN after Instinet-executing over 100 million shares a day. (Levine himself argues that "Instinet created the ECN trend, not Island. Island just did what Instinet was already doing, only better.")
Island is one of three ECNs that have filed with the SEC for permission to register as an exchange. And, it's currently the only ECN to display its real-time limit order book to the public on its Web site, using a program that Levine wrote called the BookViewer, as well as to reveal its volume statistics.
Levine, now 31, is in charge of the development of all the core systems, which have been written in DOS and Java. Going forward, where Island needs work, he says, is not in its system, but in its communications. "Our challenge in the future is to explain to the investing public how the markets work." 

Watcher and the Monster Key

Added on by C. Maoxian.

From a 1998 NYTimes article on Jeff Citron and Datek:

"One reason for Datek's success was its innovative software programs like Watcher and the Monster Key -- programs that other S.O.E.S. houses eventually licensed or mimicked. Mr. Citron and Mr. Levine, meanwhile, created an array of companies to orbit around Datek, including Smith Wall Associates, a computer services concern that had sales of $100 million in 1996. It was from many of these companies that the two say they made much of their fortunes, tens of millions of dollars. They even won over regulators by developing an electronic stock exchange called Island, a system that now handles about 4 percent of all Nasdaq trading volume."

Wonder where Josh Levine is now?  I don't think he's still at josh.com. {Update: Yes, he is, though his blog is now hosted by WordPress.)

Movies Watched -- Blue Ruin

Added on by C. Maoxian.

Revenge tale ... but about an avenger who is unable to plan ahead ... things go wrong, very wrong.  It's a downer. Overly violent.  White trash America not very realistically depicted.  But it was exactly 90 minutes long which wins big points with me.