"B 500 AAPL 326.72" a.k.a. Let's Do Something Insanely Useful

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Imported from previous forum

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[ original email was from John Harris - john.harris@bondmart.com ]
The technology exists for us to advance radically the simplicity, convenience, speed, reliability, and accessibility of trading for everyone. With this new protocol effort, let’s be truly ambitious:

  1. Every person on earth should be able to text “B 500 AAPL 326.72” (or something to that effect) from his mobile device and then receive, almost instantaneously, confirmation that he has just purchased 500 shares of Apple, Inc. at $326.72 (or better).

  2. Every person on earth should be able to type a simple string into his browser, e.g., “fixs://blahblahblah” (where “blahblahblah” equates to his instructions), or click a hyperlink that will fill his address bar to the same effect, and then receive immediate confirmation that his desires have been satisfied.

  3. Etc.

Let’s accomplish something insanely useful through our new protocol efforts. We have no excuse for settling for anything less.

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In my experience, a syntax is difficult to design in a way that it’s both simple to use and at the same time flexible and extensible.

“B 500 AAPL 326.72” relies on your notion of what you would say when entering an order by phone or otherwise. If you’d like to add a time in force, a target account or something else, what would the syntactic construct look like?

I’m not saying it can’t be done, just that it will most probably take a fair amount of work to get something really good together.

Maybe we should discuss having an “interactive / human readable” syntax in addition to a machine-to-machine syntax?

/Rolf

The technology exists for us to advance radically the simplicity, convenience, speed, reliability, and accessibility of trading for everyone. With this new protocol effort, let’s be truly ambitious:

  1. Every person on earth should be able to text “B 500 AAPL 326.72” (or something to that effect) from his mobile device and then receive, almost instantaneously, confirmation that he has just purchased 500 shares of Apple, Inc. at $326.72 (or better).

  2. Every person on earth should be able to type a simple string into his browser, e.g., “fixs://blahblahblah” (where “blahblahblah” equates to his instructions), or click a hyperlink that will fill his address bar to the same effect, and then receive immediate confirmation that his desires have been satisfied.

  3. Etc.

Let’s accomplish something insanely useful through our new protocol efforts. We have no excuse for settling for anything less.

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[ original email was from John Harris - john.harris@bondmart.com ]
Rolf,

Sorry for not being more clear on this subject. My primary point of advocacy is “advance radically the simplicity, convenience, speed, reliability, and accessibility of trading for everyone.” If we do our jobs properly, a mobile application developer will be able to create an interaction paradigm as simple as that provided in my example (using Sanskrit if he sees fit). By thinking through what would be required of us as protocol developers in order to enable such application development, we are more certain of producing an insanely useful protocol.

In my texting example, I purposefully did not provide a time in force, target account, or any other order specifications (perhaps most profoundly, including a destination for the order). It would have been trivial for me to do so, but as protocol developers, we should seek to make such additional detail optional - a point I did a poor job of making in my post. To a certain extent, the FIX Protocol already does this. If I don’t provide a value for SettlmntTyp <63> in a FIX 4.2 Allocation message, the recipient assumes “Regular.” In my example, by protocol, I may have been specifying, implicitly, a TIF of “Day” and a target account that is a default account I designated through a website maintained by my mobile-services provider, which in turn uses a protocol we have provided that lets him authenticate and otherwise communicate with my custodian so that my Apple shares wind up in the right account, against payment from the same account (or by whatever method payment is previously arranged).

Best,
John

In my experience, a syntax is difficult to design in a way that it’s both simple to use and at the same time flexible and extensible.

“B 500 AAPL 326.72” relies on your notion of what you would say when entering an order by phone or otherwise. If you’d like to add a time in force, a target account or something else, what would the syntactic construct look like?

I’m not saying it can’t be done, just that it will most probably take a fair amount of work to get something really good together.

Maybe we should discuss having an “interactive / human readable” syntax in addition to a machine-to-machine syntax?

/Rolf

The technology exists for us to advance radically the simplicity, convenience, speed, reliability, and accessibility of trading for everyone. With this new protocol effort, let’s be truly ambitious:

  1. Every person on earth should be able to text “B 500 AAPL 326.72” (or something to that effect) from his mobile device and then receive, almost instantaneously, confirmation that he has just purchased 500 shares of Apple, Inc. at $326.72 (or better).

  2. Every person on earth should be able to type a simple string into his browser, e.g., “fixs://blahblahblah” (where “blahblahblah” equates to his instructions), or click a hyperlink that will fill his address bar to the same effect, and then receive immediate confirmation that his desires have been satisfied.

  3. Etc.

Let’s accomplish something insanely useful through our new protocol efforts. We have no excuse for settling for anything less.