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Entries Tagged as 'Financial Markets'

Movie futures

March 11th, 2010 · No Comments · Financial Markets, Prediction Markets

From the FT we learn that there will be not one, but two new movie exchanges where speculators and hedgers can bet on the profitability of movies: the Cantor Fitzgerald offering, HSX (launching sometime in late April, we assume), and something call the Trend Exchange, (coming out later this month).
Why these exchanges? From the [...]

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Transparency for derivatives

March 11th, 2010 · 1 Comment · Financial Markets

The FT reports that the CFTC is pushing for greater transparency for derivatives. Since many derivatives are indeed traded on exchanges, what they’re really talking about here are derivatives traded OTC (over-the-counter). And really what they mean is swaps.
Swaps, for those of you with weak memories (like moi) are those things which brought [...]

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Google Finance’s new tool: Domestic Trends

March 10th, 2010 · No Comments · Economics, Financial Markets, Information Design, Product Development

Not sure how I didn’t see this before, but Google Finance now has a new(ish) feature called Google Domestic Trends. This is essentially Google Trends, but with the searched for keywords organized into useful concepts (i.e. retail, durable goods, automotive, etc.) and hooked into Google’s stock charts. This way a user can take [...]

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Forrester’s customer experience index. Useful to investors?

February 9th, 2010 · No Comments · Financial Markets, Usability

Forrester has been putting together a Customer Experience Index for the past few years. The index is a ranking of 133 large companies across 14 industries, and the companies are ranked based on how well customers rated their last experience with the company. It’s not clear to me, at least from their methodology, [...]

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The mouse as a crutch (or the story of the Kapitall mouse)

October 12th, 2009 · 2 Comments · Financial Markets, Usability

In the process of designing for traders there is one thing that UX people learn relatively quickly: the mouse is slow. Traders, especially professional ones, rely on keyboard shortcuts to rapidly move around an application and do the thing they’re being paid to do: trade (and hopefully make a profit). The mouse in [...]

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Alerting on Nadex … ugh

October 2nd, 2009 · No Comments · Financial Markets, Information Design

Nadex is a sort of derivatives market with a play money side. This is how the alerting mechanism works for price changes.

In an acronym: WTF?
A couple UI points:

This may seem very cool, but it’s almost impossible to tell what’s going on here. The highlighted price is almost impossible to pair [...]

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Systems need people

October 2nd, 2009 · 1 Comment · Financial Markets

John Authers of the FT had a nice piece yesterday discussing the winners and losers in the drama that has been the stock market over the past year or so.
Of the many points he makes the most interesting is: of the many victims of the crash (and rebound?) perhaps the most important is the idea [...]

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Making investing as easy (and safe) as making toast

September 28th, 2009 · No Comments · Financial Markets, Information Design

Robert Shiller has a nice op-ed piece in today’s FT about financial innovation and the complexity of financial products. It is often assumed that financial products are overly complex (and indeed many are), and that financial innovation gives rise to yet more complexity. Yet, Shiller contends, why is this a problem.

New [...]

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Rock your stoc ..

September 22nd, 2009 · No Comments · Financial Markets, Information Design

… or send it to outer space, as the case may be.
I came across this — Stoc — in the blogosphere (thanks info aesthetics). It’s a stock universe, where different sizes and speeds of the stars (or planets?) correspond to certain market characteristics, such as volatility and market cap. It is, in short, [...]

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You are the bank

September 12th, 2009 · 1 Comment · Financial Markets

I recently interviewed Chris Larsen, the CEO of Prosper, about their new and improved rating system for borrowers. I’ll be honest, he didn’t give away much that can’t be found already on the Prosper blog. Apparently there is also a white paper describing the new rating system (which they promised to send but [...]

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