Pinning Down Prices

For any trading desk, Market Replay is an invaluable too, because it can service a range of customer requests related to all matters of trade pricing and compliance, Jacobs says. Prop trading desks and even high-net-worth individuals interested in trade price information would be well served by it, he says.

But the question some have is whether there really is a widespread interest for that kind of minute price detail. Financial advisors like New York-based Hemant Singh, founder of the independent advisory firm Private Wealth Management, don't doubt that broker/dealers, especially those that are servicing high-speed, automated traders, would be in an advantageous position by having Market Replay in their repertoire, as they would be able to offer a greater level of service to their clients. However, Singh believes that Market Replay would be more of a "back up" resource than a primary tool, because he doesn't think that market participants, or retail investors, at any rate, are clamoring for millisecond-level precision. Tools such as Nasdaq's Level II, which helps investors gain a better understanding of the current trends in the securities they're invested in as well as the technical factors that may be influencing their price, are very comprehensive, Singh says, and together with the time and sales data readily available today, provide solid back-up for any questions or doubts that investors might have.

However, there is no denying that precision is key, especially today when participants are more jittery than ever, and financial transactions are complex, so there definitely has to be a place for a tool as cutting-edge as Market Replay.

"There are other tools out there but they are not so easy to use," Jacobs says. "The thing about [Market Replay] is that it is a standard Windows application, you can expand out very easily, and you don't need any technical knowledge to use it."

Market Replay was developed with Adobe Flex 3 and deployed on Adobe AIR, both of which launched at the same time as the tool itself. Adobe Flex is a cross-platform framework for creating rich Internet applications (RIAs) while Adobe AIR lets developers use their existing Web development skills in HTML, Ajax, Flash and Flex to deploy RIAs to the desktop.

Savita Iyer-Ahrestani is a freelance business journalist who is currently based in Arnhem, The Netherlands. She can be reached at [email protected].