Equational

My favorite skateboarders these days are Rodney Mullen, Ben Raybourn, Chris Haslam, and Chris Cole. There is an interview of Rodney Mullen where he says he is looking for a special "silhouette" in skaters. In fact, he is saying the he is looking for uniquely talented skaters that have internalized their skating into their cognitive growth process. To give you a mental image of what I am saying: We all need things we can lean on to grow. What I mean by "leaning on something", is that we use it to support us, we use it as dependable reference. When we are young we lean on our parents. Later, most of us lean on our social/economic "fabric". Yet others lean on their own selves. If you are unlucky, this self "leaning" may make you a unpleasant narcissistic person, yet if you are more lucky you do not lean on a "synthetic" self created social reference, like a narcissist person, but on a self created non-social reference. And for the people...

Financial exchanges can be seen as big computer clusters that are accessed through specialized APIs.  There are usually a few different ways to access an exchange. The connectivity can be direct or indirect, and there are usually different APIs for the different services.  Direct connectivity is the fastest way to interact with the exchange and pretty much implies that you are a member of the exchange or that you are working closely with an exchange member. If you cannot afford or do not want to bother with direct connectivity then you access the exchange indirectly: your system will connect to a broker’s system that is connected to the exchange.  Such a broker access may bundle up the different services into one API (e.g. using the FIX protocol). Direct connectivity usually has different APIs for different services.  Typically there might be a trading API, a price feed API and a clearing API. Orders and quotes are entered and updated on the trading API.  This A...