At today's Senate Agriculture Committee hearing, even Andrei Kirilenko, the former CFTC chief economist and now MIT professor brought in to critique HFT, outlined a regulatory path rather than a firing squad.Those who dislike and distrust speculators, particularly clever speculators, will not be mollified, but today's Senate Agriculture Committee hearing suggested that high frequency trading (HFT) is here to stay. Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) chief Terry Duffy claimed concurrence by regulators that today's futures markets are more open and transparent than ever before. He noted that electronic trading has increased liquidity and narrowed bid/ask prices. Additionally, since the CME has imposed price/quantity limits and other means of bl...
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.