Wired Magazine, NYSE cloud and Moe Greene

Last year Wired magazine ran a piece titled Algorithms Take Control of Wall Street where they took a look at high speed trading. One of its authors has followed up to that piece with a blog post titled Will the NYSE’s cloud democratize markets? No, it won’t. We’ll get to the blog post in a minute. But first, it’s worthy to note that the subject of high speed trading is no longer just hidden in a dark corner of Wall Street. No longer is it a subject that just the industry insiders understand. Recent volatility has led many in the public to start asking questions about what goes on inside the black boxes of the high speed trading firms. And they want to know more about who is supplying these high speed traders with the hardware and data that lets them do what they do.

The Wired blog post focuses in on the next generation of co-location services offered by the exchanges. Apparently, the ability to collocate will now be able to get wholesaled in the “cloud”. Don’t want to bore you with all the technical details but it seems like just another way for the exchanges to try to generate more profits from their data center investments. The author of the blog post states:

“The mythical Midwestern financial planner won’t actually be buying exchange access directly from the NYSE. Rather, she’ll be buying it from an large intermediary who is a licensed NYSE member that has bid for exchange access. Different intermediaries will no doubt offer different access speeds to clients, tiered by price, and the biggest Wall Street firms that are NYSE members won’t need intermediaries. So, meet the new boss, a much larger, cloudified version of the old boss.”

As we can personally attest, the folks at the NYSE communications department are very aware of what is said about them in the blogosphere. And they are usually quick to respond. In fact, they may even respond to what we are writing here today. The Wired blog post must have set off an alarm at the NYSE because it got a quick response from their Corporate Communications department. They were not happy about some “inaccuracies” in the post and they were not happy that they weren’t contacted before it was published. Here is a bit of that response:

“My name is Eric Ryan and I work in Corporate Communications for NYSE Euronext. I wanted to address several critical inaccuracies in your blog post regarding access to co-location services and our recently-launched cloud platform (the Capital Markets Community Platform) that could lead your readers to a false conclusion. Having not been contacted by you before this post was published, I’d like to now highlight some of the factual errors that improperly characterize the hard work that our commercial technology unit, NYSE Technologies and our internal technology teams have done.”

Uh-oh Wired magazine, you are messing with the NYSE and as Fredo from The Godfather said “You don’t come to Las Vegas and talk to a man like Moe Greene like that!”. Wired, don’t you know that ANYBODY can collocate as long as you pay the ransom (sorry meant pay the fees). Don’t you know that the exchanges are just trying to help all investors (or at least those that can pony up the huge amount of cash to set up a high speed trading system). So, next time make sure you check in with the exchange bosses or they may just be sending you another nasty note.