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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: axial who wrote (31314)	9/11/2009 9:52:09 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Respond to of 46821

Hi Jim. Thanks for posting that item. It called to mind the desk-level P&L systems we once developed that tracked traders assets, which included all in-house and outside systems usage and entitlements (features from each of the market data and ticker-plant apps, e.g., SIAC, NYSE, Reuters, Bloomberg, Dow, etc.), personal systems and power utilization costs, real estate, etc., against liabilities in determining a basis for a P&L accounting used to determine commissions. Wow. We never ran into anything that was so intractable as this, though. When I first read your post, in fact, I recalled a discussion I had with an acquaintance who was a quant at Lehman at the time the debacle unfolded, asking him what was going to happen in connection with this very type of eventuality, since it was generally perceived that virtually everyone would be let go (which turned out to be the case, at his stratum of involvement <which, as I understand it, was rather critical>, almost across the board). re: Once it went bankrupt, the staff who supported these systems “evaporated”, according to Steven O’Hanlon, president of Numerix, a pricing and valuation company which is working with Lehman Brothers Holding Inc to unwind the derivatives portfolio. “The more time goes by, the less insight remains in terms of the people who staffed those systems.” Contrast, from a blog I just bumped into: -- How to retire (respectfully) legacy systems Natty Gur, Enterprise Architect \| 09-11-09 They served us for a long period of time, but (for different reasons that I wont cover in this post) now the time to say good bye and to retire them. Legacy systems exist in each and every enterprise and we all have the experience of retire them. The question is whether your enterprise have a predefine process to retire legacy systems or is just process that happened? In this post I'll try to share a retirement process for legacy systems. Cont.: weblogs.asp.net ------

To: axial who wrote (31314)	9/12/2009 2:59:40 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Respond to of 46821

Hi Jim, All. It should come as no surprise to anyone who frequents this forum that I can't help but notice, and then go on to post about, the parallels across industry and life's sectors, which often are often seemingly disparate domains of interest, with respect to their movements and trends. As a result, it is almost impossible, at times, to avoid posting items that "appear" to be off topic to the intent of this forum, when in fact the underlying economic dynamics that are common to them all may be spot on to the forum's primary foci. Jim's earlier posting in #msg-25935710 of Lehman's demise, for example, reflects the fragility of governance and knowledge management, not to mention the probative value of an institutions books (essentially, its IT system files), when organizations that are crucial to the nation's security and viability are permitted to grow their information infrastructures and allow them to flourish in secreted fashion, or even in the wild. Today I came across another article in the New York Times that hints about yet another similarity, in this case it's about how an industry structure, or a government (think: Berlin Wall), or even the electric power grid, for that matter, can be taken down through a series of cascading events, and in the case at hand, the measures that were taken to preclude or otherwise avert (even if only momentarily) such a demise: Lehman Had to Die So Global Finance Could Live By Joe Nocera \| NY Times \| September 12, 2009 nytimes.com ------

To: axial who wrote (31314)	9/13/2009 5:53:20 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 46821

Science Unboxed: Wall Street’s Math Wizards Forgot a Few Variables By Steve Lohr \| NY Times Science Section \| September 13, 2009 IN the aftermath of the great meltdown of 2008, Wall Street’s quants have been cast as the financial engineers of profit-driven innovation run amok. They, after all, invented the exotic securities that proved so troublesome. But the real failure, according to finance experts and economists, was in the quants’ mathematical models of risk that suggested the arcane stuff was safe. The risk models proved myopic, they say, because they were too simple-minded. They focused mainly on figures like the expected returns and the default risk of financial instruments. What they didn’t sufficiently take into account was human behavior, specifically the potential for widespread panic. When lots of investors got too scared to buy or sell, markets seized up and the models failed. Cont.: nytimes.com FAC: Note in the left-hand margin, some interesting graphipcs, sidebar articles and a number of video clips featuring a number of key players of last year's unfolding. ------