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Markets for the Digital Generation

Here is a story (from efinancialnews.com) that caught my eye: “Electricity shortage stalls IT development”

Complex trading strategies have fuelled an explosion in market data that algorithms crunch to enable traders to pounce on every market opportunity. But, while chips offer more processing power than before, Wall Street is experiencing a technology challenge: finding enough electricity to feed and cool power-hungry servers crammed in overheated data centres.

For Cristóbal Conde, chief executive of financial services group SunGard, this poses big problems. He said: “Data centres were designed with a ratio of power consumption versus square foot. With the power requirements of the new hardware, these ratios are no longer valid.

“Some data centres operate at only 70% capacity because there isn’t enough power.”

Bringing enough power to a Wall Street tower housing a financial group’s data centre creates structural problems, as huge cables must be safely fitted into buildings that are not designed for powerful wiring.

According to sources, extreme data crunching can raise the temperature at the back of a server rack by 10 degrees compared with the front box facing a cooling unit, creating operational risk. The faster the chip, the hotter the room, and the more electricity is needed which is difficult to accommodate.

I don’t want to overthink this but longer term, what does this portend for location and real-estate trends for trading hubs? Do you really want to be in the middle of a big hot city? Where is the tipping point between the (human) network effect of clustered competencies and the (machine) need for big and cool?
Will hedge funds and exchanges migrate north? Will McKenzie Brothers be the quant-driven investment bank for the 21st century? Based in Newfoundland to take advantage of the cool weather and being 30min ahead of New York - so they can see the future first of course…)

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I have to apologize to regular readers for the erratic and low volume of posts recently. I currently have 12 posts in draft unpublished state and probably 20+ more in proto-draft state (ie electronic sticky note to myself with a couple of bullet points and/or links.) Lots of reasons this raw material isn’t making it to your screen - travel, work, kids and one in particular that ties into my interest in climate change, and will give you insight as to how I manage(d) to maintain a blog while leading an extremely busy life besides.

Typically, throughout the day as ideas, articles, links would come to my attention in the course of my daily routine, I would either make quick note of them (a virtual scratchpad) or quickly draft the skeletal outlines of a post. In the evening and / or on the weekend I would edit these, scrapping those that weren’t as interesting or germane as I thought at first blush and cleaning up those that were. (Now I know that there are several schools of blogging, many who would say that I should just publish the ‘raw’ stream of consciousness and that the editing process that I go through is not true to the blogging ethos. My view is that there are a number of different styles of blogs none of which is intrinsically superior; all have their purpose and, like most things in life, if executed well and adapted to that purpose are equally good or valuable.)

But in the last 3 weeks or so, the scorching heat of tropical London has made my normal routine impossible. Why? Well the interior temperature at my house has been between 35-40 degrees most evenings and my lovely iMac G5 can’t hack it! Even with a desk fan inches away on high the heat is too much and after anything from 2min to 20 seconds of use it puts itself to sleep. Drives you nuts and it is clearly impossible to work on that basis. I resisted the temptation to rush down to Homebase and buy a portable airconditioning unit, they are probably sold out in any event. But it did drive home how reliant we (I?) am on being connected. (Betfair market on 100F or higher being the highest recorded temperature in Mainland UK this summer:)

I guess I should have hedged my lost productivity…

If you’ve seen An Inconvenient Truth or Al Gore’s live presentation (have only as yet seen the trailer of the former, you can see the latter courtesy of BMW and TED as a podcast), and live on this planet you won’t be surprised when you read that the Weather Risk Management Association (WMRA) reports that the notional value of weather risk management contracts transacted in the year ending March 2006 has increased by a factor of 5 (from $9.7bn to $45.2bn) year-on-year. And as well as growing, the market is broadening as well (from the IFR reporting on the joint PWC/WMRA survey:)

“…Whereas energy sector companies represented about 69% of the potential end users inquiring about weather instruments in 2004-2005, they represented 48% this time around. Queries from potential clients from the agricultural, transportation, retail and construction sectors have also increased, the study found.”

I know weather derivatives aren’t new. But their time has come. Watch this space as the power law kicks in and the market mirrors the growth paths of interest rate or credit derivatives to become a multi-trillion dollar market over the next 5-10 years.

(* for those of you too young, old, non-North American to have been raised on the pablum of US network television and the advertising that paid for it, an explanation of ‘Where’s the beef?’, as the headline of this post meaning - ‘Where’s the posts?’ Of course updated to 2006, this tagline would most probably be translated as ‘Where are the snakes?” To which the answer of course is…‘on a plane.’)

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