Let’s not debate the merits of the enormous regulatory changes from the SEC today, but take it as a given that we all need to deal with it.  Today’s unheralded announcement, as well as the 2 week expiration date, represent lightning-fast time frames in an industry that is typically given years to prepare for such large  structural changes.

The software you use should be able to adapt - quickly.  It touches every part of your trading business from regulatory (obviously), to trading strategy formulation, to risk management. When even extra-loud value investor Jim Cramer is suggesting short-term trading strategies because of these changes, you know this represents a fundamental shift.

So how are your systems faring?  What would you like to see them do better? And, what would you like to be able to change right now?

It’s been an eventful week in the capital markets, as four fairly large dislocations sent traders scrambling.
I’m not going to comment on the Fannie/Freddie bailout, or on the glitch at the LSE that halted trading for much of Monday.  And I’ll leave it to Paul Kedrosky at “Infectious Greed” to draw a connection between the Lehman announcement and the first test of the Large Hadron Collider.

But let’s look at the darkly comical story of the United Airlines stock plunge at 11am Monday. The catalyst was when a reporter at Income Securities Advisor re-posted a 2002 United bankruptcy filing, feeding a wire service published on thousands of Bloomberg terminals worldwide and flagged as “new” news.

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