http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/26/news/bxlime.php
Mark Gorton, the 'classic entrepreneur' behind Lime Group.
By Lisa KassenaarBloomberg News
Monday, March 26, 2007
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NEW YORK: Step off the elevator into Lime Group's offices atop an 11-story brick building in the Chinatown neighborhood of New York and into a crowd of more than 60 stone Buddhas and Asian lions, all handpicked by the company's founder, Mark Gorton.
To the right, down a staircase, is a metal door that leads to Lime Brokerage, which Gorton says trades stocks faster than any other company on Wall Street - as many as 6,000 orders a second. At the end of a long hall is LimeWire, maker of the world's most-popular Internet file-sharing software, with 50 million monthly users. The U.S. recording industry says the product is designed for infringing upon music copyrights - an accusation Gorton denies - and is suing for damages of at least $450 million.
Gorton himself sits at a corner desk with a group of mathematicians writing algorithms for Tower Research Capital, Lime Group's quantitative hedge fund, a firm with $117 million in assets. His next project, scheduled for this spring, is Lime Medical, which will sell software intended to help U.S. doctors reduce paperwork. He is also developing LimeSpot, Internet-based software to help people build and share Web sites. And he runs a nonprofit Web-based venture in urban planning, part of his pet project to reduce traffic in New York.
"He's a classic entrepreneur," said Fred von Lohmann, an intellectual property attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group based in San Francisco. "He has a lot of businesses going at the same time, and if they don't work out, he'll start three more."
Gorton agreed.
"My to-do list doesn't ever seem to end," he said. "The biggest problem is that I may not be able to keep the focus; I can get distracted."
Gorton, 40, is an electrical engineer and former bond trader who has degrees from Harvard, Stanford and Yale. The Lime companies are slices of Gorton's view of the digital future - one in which the right software will smooth almost any human interaction, from trading stocks to swapping songs, from recording a patient's medical diagnosis to placing speed bumps on city streets. His 140 employees are mostly computer scientists in their 20s and 30s who share his ideals, particularly that software should be open source - that it can be modified by any of its users.
"It's the ideas that push things forward for him," said Rob Hranac, who worked for Lime from 2001 to 2003 as a software developer in the charity wing and now heads business development at Berkeley Transportation Systems in Berkeley, California. "The money is a vehicle to get things out there."
Even though it is private, Lime Brokerage has attracted the notice of Scott Appleby, an analyst who follows publicly traded financial exchanges at Deutsche Bank Securities in New York. "Lime is a leader, and this is the future of part of the broker-dealer world," he said. "Their pipes are built in such a way that you can get a lot of orders done in a short time."
But Gorton has his eye on other goals.
"I've beaten the markets a half dozen times and will do it a half dozen more," he said. "As a personal challenge, it doesn't mean that much anymore."
What means more, he said, is traffic. Gorton, who cycles six miles, or 10 kilometers, to work down the Greenway on the West Side of the New York borough of Manhattan and dreams of his three children riding their bikes on a car-free Broadway, said he spent $2 million last year on projects to promote pedestrian traffic and cycling in New York.
Since September, he has more than doubled the staff to 27 people at The Open Planning Project, the nonprofit group known as TOPP, which is developing software for a wiki, or collaborative Web site, to let anyone add to the urban planning in a given locale.
Gorton traded bonds for almost five years on the proprietary fixed-income desk at the investment bank Credit Suisse First Boston. In February 1998, Gorton and Alistair Brown, a Credit Suisse colleague and fellow engineer, rented a small office in Manhattan and started Tower Research with money they had earned at the investment bank.
Brown, who has an engineering degree from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, and who used to build computer systems to execute trading strategies at Credit Suisse, now is chief executive of Lime Brokerage.
Its trading is carried out by a hundred computers at a facility in Jersey City, New Jersey, where more than 50 customers, mostly hedge funds, also have their equipment. Those computers are set to profit from market inefficiencies that would be lost if their orders had to travel across town on a telecommunications line, said the chief technology officer of Lime, Anthony Amicangioli, who holds an electrical engineering degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and joined Lime in 2003 from Juniper Networks.
Lime's computers grab price quotes from exchanges like the Nasdaq Stock Market and the New York Stock Exchange in one-tenth of a millisecond. That is more than twice as fast as other companies offering so-called data delivery, Amicangioli said.
Once Lime grabs the price quotes, the system executes trades in less than a millisecond.
Brokers working to shave times are increasingly important as so-called program trading explodes, said Brian Hyndman, senior vice president of Nasdaq Transaction Services. That activity - by Lime and rivals accounts for about 40 percent of the roughly 2.3 billion shares traded every day on Nasdaq, Hyndman said. That is up from about 5 percent in 1999.
Monday, March 26, 2007
Sunday, March 04, 2007
march 07
Gold and silver
Gibt es Parallelen zu Ereignissen in früheren Jahrzehnten, die mehr waren als eine lokale Erscheinung – die Saving-and-Loans-Krise in den USA oder der Zusammenbruch des Junk-Bond-Marktes – und wie lange hatte es damals gedauert, bis der Schaden behoben war?
Parallelen gibt es durchaus. In allen Fällen wurde dem Risikoaspekt zu wenig Rechnung getragen. Deshalb kam und kommt es zu schmerzhaften Korrekturen. Der Gesundungsprozess kann lange Zeit benötigen. So hatte es bis 1993 gedauert, bis die Saving-and-Loans-Krise von 1986 ausgestanden war. Der Einfluss auf die Börsen war jedoch unbedeutend. Von Anfang 1986 bis Ende 1993 ist die US-Börse immerhin um 300% gestiegen.
L'Europe tragique et magnifique - at 50Published: March 19 2007 02:00 | Last updated: March 19 2007 02:0http://www.ft.com/cms/s/9fab2078-d5be-11db-a5c6-000b5df10621.html
POSCO , Synthes, Burckhardt Compression,Axa, Allianz und Swiss Life , hsbc . MARCH OPTIONS DEADLINE .
eventually the correction came but I was not prepared , once again. the speed of the decline was faster than the last one in april 06 , the trigger was further away , china , and the reasons weaker but sufficient . I believe the market is going to jiggle but all in all will come back to challenge us again, the wildy , fiercy beast... funny enough to notice the comments of the press and the mass media , complacent with a smily happy face as per very recent , they are turning now into ugly screaming scared faces with in their front written I told you....rethoric works in finance too,and those believing in selffulfilling prophecies are trying to avert any major hysterical crisis by toning down the comments . one thing is clear , bernanke is out of control in his new position , incapable of playing the director in the symphonic orchestra , too much cacaphonies for the public , certainly he is less brilliant than his predecessor greenspan in managing and articulating the loudspeakers ...........he is a just a professor at harvard with no clue about life and the fucking public.
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