bloomberg terminal
"What makes the terminals so popular on Wall Street is not just their comprehensive data, but their social value. The Bloomberg terminal is like the Facebook of Wall Street; a social tool that connects the financial world. The trading terminal has one major advantage: Bloomberg Instant, a widely popular chat/messaging system that Bloomberg sells as instant access to important people, and logs 200m messages - or 15m to 20m chats a day among 310,000 subscribers. Here's the ad copy on it, which gives you a sense of what Bloomberg is really selling through its terminals: influence."
This is one reason the market moves so fast; there are 310,000 big money smart money people efficiently connected and getting information faster than those not plugged into this expensive network.
"What should have been obvious to me was that there is a tremendous mismatch in skills between the SEC regulators and the people they are supposed to be regulating. The quants who create these financial products understand differential equations and nonnormal statist-ics; they program in languages the SEC doesn't speak; they run statistical packages the SEC doesn't even know exist. The quants are busy data mining with supercomputers while the SEC is still panning by hand. I suspect SEC attorneys like Grant Ward are probably well- intentioned. I'm sure they want to do a good job, but they never should have been put in their positions. Sending lawyers to oversee capital markets professionals is like sending chickens to chase foxes; it just doesn't work, because there's an unbridgeable skills gap between the two. It would be akin to asking me to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court."
page 278
"No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller"
There are 310,000 people connected to this web within a web. They are the big money investors and traders. When things happen, this system informs those who purchase it much faster than the average investor.
METAMIA is a free database of analogy and metaphor. Anyone can contribute or search. The subject matter can be anything. Science is popular, but poetry is encouraged. The goal is to integrate our fluid muses with the stark literalism of a relational database. Metamia is like a girdle for your muses, a cognitive girdle.