UsableMarkets

markets, design, usability, research

UsableMarkets header image 4

Entries Tagged as 'Wall Street'

Book Review: Wriston’s Last

June 5th, 2008 · Comments Off · Book Reviews, Financial Markets

Recently I received a request to review Bits, bytes, and balance sheets: The New Economic Rules of Engagement by Walter Wriston (ex-CEO of Citicorp). I can’t even remember who sent the request, but I always say yes to requests like this. After all, who can say no to free books? And then you never quite [...]

[Read more →]

Tags:·····

Dark Pools Drain Liquidity … (from the WSJ)

May 12th, 2008 · Comments Off · Financial Markets, Product Development

HT to Gong for this article from the WSJ. Boom in ‘Dark Pool’ Trading Networks Is Causing Headaches on Wall Street By SCOTT PATTERSON and AARON LUCCHETTI May 8, 2008 When Cheryl Cargie, head trader at Ariel Investments LLC in Chicago, decided last month to buy 1.3 million shares of a midcap stock listed on [...]

[Read more →]

Tags:····································

Simplification Enters the Financial Realm

April 20th, 2008 · Comments Off · Financial Markets

The Economist has a nice editorial about the complexity of derivatives and how their trading can be simplified. But the solution hardly seems inspiring: listing the derivatives on public exchanges. The main benefit is that settlement and clearing can be better managed, but to achieve these benefits, and to get listed on the exchanges, products [...]

[Read more →]

Tags:

What Does Wall Street Think of Google and Their User Experience

February 28th, 2008 · Comments Off · Information Markets, Usability

No doubt you’ve heard the news. Google’s stock is falling because people are not clicking on their vaunted text ads. Wall Street seems a bit confused about why people are clicking less on Google’s ads. This quote from the FT captures the confusion: Mark Mahaney, Citigroup analyst, said the decline could be caused by Google’s [...]

[Read more →]

Tags:··········

Online Ads Are Here To … Be Blocked

February 4th, 2008 · 1 Comment · Other Markets

I once wrote an article called Ads Are Here To Stay. Perhaps I was naive back then (or maybe wise, who knows), but it seemed to me (and perhaps everyone else) that online ads were on their way to becoming a permanent fixture of the web, paying as they did for all of that free, [...]

[Read more →]

Tags:·············

Margins From Amazon, With Love (aka. What Is “Margin”?)

January 5th, 2008 · Comments Off · Market Definitions, Other Markets, Usability

Today’s NY Times has this piece in the Business section: Put Buyers First? What a Concept. In many ways it is a typical focusing-on-the-customer -experience-makes-for-better-business story. It seems almost passe in the UX world to cite these things – there are many examples, from Apple to Zappos – but it is a good story. First, [...]

[Read more →]

Tags:······

Do Traders Read About Economics? (or the Poetry of Alexander Pope?)

December 20th, 2007 · 1 Comment · Financial Markets, Market Definitions

Frankly, I don’t know, but one has to wonder if the risk managers at Morgan Stanley do. For those who don’t follow these fascinating little stories, I’ll back up. Morgan Stanley is one of a number of investment banks that have reported mind-numbingly huge ($9.4 billion!) losses due to bad bets on sub-prime mortgage based [...]

[Read more →]

Tags:··

eBay: Time for a Change

June 25th, 2007 · 2 Comments · Auction Markets, Usability

For those of us who follow such things, it is interesting to note that eBay has been making some noise lately about improving its usability. First there was Project San Dimas, eBay’s desktop application. Then those funny little eBay widgets (aka eBay To Go). And finally eBay recently announced upcoming changes to the mothership itself. [...]

[Read more →]

Tags:···

Tales From The Chart Side

November 19th, 2006 · Comments Off · Information Design

I’m a huge fan of well designed charts. One of my favorite examples of a great a stock chart is over at stockcharts.com. StockCharts example First of all, the sequence of the stochastic indicators, to the price information, to volume, to MACD indicators tells a real story. The different trend lines, mapped with standard deviations [...]

[Read more →]

Tags:···

PicksPal Discovers that Some People Are Lucky

September 24th, 2006 · Comments Off · Prediction Markets

Recently TechCrunch wrote a nice post about a company called PicksPal. PicksPal, a sports prediction market, has apparently discovered that some people can pick winners of sporting events more frequently than other people. And PicksPal has decided to make a nice business out of this by selling picks from top pickers (the picks of the [...]

[Read more →]

Tags:····