The Quotecast desktop
The Quote-cast desktop is a desktop application that provides a graphical user interface (GUI) that displays all the information available to a user.
Key features
Clean, elegant display of market and analytic data.
- Well designed screen gives users all the key data at a glance while intuitive mouse and keyboard interactions allow for instant drill downs into fine grained detail.
- Users can create and configure multiple Quote-cast windows each configured with its own column layout, filter, sort and analytic options.
- Filter and sort screen content based on wide range of criteria simultaneously. Users can browse through all available data or create, name, and save their own pre-set filtering conditions.
- Customizable rules-based highlighting of situations of interest.
- Hot keys allow instant focus on situations of interest.
User's TVs and greeks integrated.
- In-house analytical information integrated though the Quote-cast Valuation Service API.
- User-configurable column management gives users high degree of control over column layout and displays. Standard defaults capture most greeks out-of-the box.
- 'Smart' columns allow calculated values to be scaled to user-friendly units. For example a vega value could be represented as a cash amount per 1000 lots taking contract size into account.
- Simple wrapper API allows rapid integration of proprietary pricing libaries or services. API implementations are discovered automatically by the OSGi framework.
- Off-the-shelf API implemenatations available for some well-known analytics packages.
- Quotecast framework has built-in configuration mangement for users runtime details such as usernames, passwords and host addresses.
- Multiple pricing services can be installed simultaneously. Users can switch between services at runtime.
Rules based highlighting allows traders to identify at a glance IOIs of particular interest.
Problem : a screen containing ‘just’ Euro Stoxx IOIs might contain many hundreds of markets. How can a trader identify, at a glance, situations of particular interest ?
Solution : user defined highlighting allows traders to pick out situations of interest. Default highlighting criteria include…
- Bids above and offers below theoretical value.
- All markets that are close to trading as based on multiple thresholds.
- All markets where any trader has entered an internal blotter price. Colors can be chosen to indicate whether the order is ‘behind’, ‘joined’ or ‘alone’ on the bid or offer.
Zoom function toggles instantly to and from a IOI subset based on pre-defined rules.
Problem : a screen containing ‘just’ Euro Stoxx IOIs might contain many hundreds of markets. How can a trader quickly discard markets so as to focus only on those situations of interest ?
Solution : single key strokes allowing the trader to narrow the screen content to just those situations of interest. Default zooms include...
- All markets from a single broker
- All markets where the trader has entered a blotter order
- All markets that are close to trading
- All markets on a single expiry
- All markets updated within a timeframe
Enterprise-wide order blotter allows desks to track responses.
- Intuitive order and trade entry forms reduce manual input to a bare minmium.
- Entry forms are context sensitive and pre-populated with structure data and price details. Point, click, adjust and the entry is done.
- Fine grained access control to blotter allows blotter to be shared with entire operation or selected groups of individuals.
- Blotter data can be held internally or published via any gateway that supports two way data flows.
- Full audit trail of who entered or updated what and when.
Comprehensive instrument coverage and sophisticated data modelling.
Quote-cast covers a wider range of financial products. These include...
- Currencies.
- Equities, ADRs and ETFs.
- Equity, commodity and rate indices.
- Listed options and futures.
- Generic options.
- Total return and dividend swaps.
- Variance and volatility swaps.
Sophisticated data model allows...
- Market structure definitions are based on a geared portfolio of instruments and not tied to a limited set of combinations.
- Market structures are independent from instruments. This allows rapid extension of the product set. We can simply add another product definition to the mix.
- Highly configurable symbol mapping infrastructure allows customers to map different external ticker schemes to their own preferred in-house symbols.
- Symbol mapping infrastructure able to identify identical structures from multiple quote sources and time periods. This results in a unique structure identifier which is vital for both real time and historical analysis.
- Order structures can handle multiple contingent references each based on a different financial product. Need a futures reference and a rate reference ? No problem.
- Order and trade structures are independent from the market structure easing historic search.
Instant messaging and dedicated private chatrooms, user interface optimsed for high message volumes.
Quote-cast leverages the XMPP messaging protocol for client/server session mangement and comunication.