If you're creating an Active Directory domain, use a real domain name

Not .local, or .corp, or .intra, all of which may soon be owned by someone else or otherwise cause odd problems. Just say no.

Financial Apartheid

Strong title, but basically true. The toxic brew of regulations over the past decade or two has pushed companies and trading out of the lit markets into darker corners, where only the elite can meet and greet. One example from the book of unintended consequences:

One of the big drivers of the shrinkage in our public markets is that we no longer have a different market structure specialized for smaller companies, like we did in the bad old days. The old Nasdaq dealer market had a very different market structure from the old NYSE auction market. In the old Nasdaq dealer market, only dealer quotes were disseminated to the general public. Customers had no way of getting wide exposure for their limit orders and competing with the dealers. The result was a bid-ask spread so wide you could drive an IPO through it.

The wide spreads that we thought were a scandal did have one redeeming social benefit: They motivated the industry to market smaller companies to investors.

CBOE Wins!

CHICAGO, IL - May 13, 2013 -- The Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) announced today that the Supreme Court of the United States denied the International Securities Exchange's (ISE) petition to review the Illinois Appellate Court's decision that permanently restrained and enjoined ISE from listing or providing an exchange market for the trading of S&P 500 Index (SPX) and Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJX) options and enjoined OCC from issuing, clearing or settling the exercise of such ISE options. This brings to a close over six years of litigation.

Not sure why this excites me so much . . . perhaps just because I find the ISE difficult to deal with.

Redbooks!

If you use them, click on the link and show your love. It would be a pain and a shame if IBM stopped making them.

Computer programming in a nutshell

As explained by dinosaurs.

Behold the ETMF

If approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the investment vehicle could make it unnecessary to disclose portfolio holdings every day -- and in so doing potentially reshape the mutual fund industry, which has relied on infrequent disclosure of holdings to protect the ability of managers to achieve above-average returns and avoid front running.

It does seem challenging to maintain a market in something that you don't know the value of:

But Ben Johnson, director of passive funds research at Morningstar, said that the lack of portfolio transparency might prevent market makers from buying into the idea of EMTFs and participating. “We’ll have to see what this looks like in practice once you get these products in a live trading environment,” he said

But maybe no worse than making a market in IBM, a feat that always amazes me.

Mismatched socks

Had a little situation at work today. I can't get into the details, but basically, an upstream data provider decided that this was how they were going to populate their data file. Close enough.