Client side COM in Python

I’ve been dabbling in client side COM using Mark Hammond’s excellent win32com utils. It’s remarkably painless…

Marketcetera

Can Marketcetera be viable competition for Charles River and LatentZero ?  Interesting that their website makes no mention of the “sell market data and trading services” strategy that Matt Asay details. They would appear to be following an interesting variation of classic platform strategy a la Ferguson. Except in this case they’re not commoditising the layers below. They’re attempting to commoditise the layer above – the OMS – then lock clients into the layer below – the market data and services. It will be interesting to see how they execute on this novel strategy.

Fixed income buy side desktop

So what is running on the desktop of a buy side fixed income trader ?  From my viewpoint here inside a dealer, I imagine the buy side do all their trades on Bloomberg, TradeWeb or by phone. But then I am an etrading guy, so I would say that, wouldn’t I ?

Is there anybody out there executing trades from an OMS like Charles River ?   Would any buy side FI trader use LatentZero ?

Resolver launch

I went to the Resolver One launch party last week, and had a pleasant evening soaking up wine and nibbles, and meeting Giles and Robert, the depressingly young management team. It was good to see all that startup energy and passion.

The Resolver team have an excellent product, but I think they need to improve the way they present it. The presenters all made basic errors, like not telling us who they are, facing the screen and reading the slides (evidence of under rehearsal), and not hammering home the key message by restating it. I think canned demos that illustrate specific applications are needed too. Basically the Resolver guys need a bit of slick sales snake oil.

The Resolver

So I’ve had a little play with Resolver One, now that it’s out of beta and at 1.0. To give a somewhat simplistic view, it’s an Excel clone implemented in IronPython. Where it scores big over Excel is in exposing its internals, specifically the calc model and worksheet in one seamless view. In Excel, we have several different APIs for injecting our own logic into a spreadsheet: Excel’s own internal C API for coding XLLs, VBA and COM. Those APIs allow us to express worksheet functionality in C, VB and any COM language. Resolver gives us one seamless view of its internals in our favourite programming language: Python. Simple example here.

This is attractive for those of us already using Python for front office systems. I’m not sure how much it will appeal to others though…