Automating the boring stuff

All market participants want to be the next Jim Simmons. No one wants to take care of the plumbing. People want to do the exciting stuff. They want to show up with their billion-dollar idea and trade away. They do not want to take care of risk management. In this section are a few examples of time-consuming and ultimately boring processes that should be automated and the reasons why.

Trade reconciliation is the process of reconciling orders placed with trades executed. It shows what trades went through at what price. This is one of the few tasks that would make reading the tax code look like an exciting endeavor. Yet it is an important task as the data is used to perform trade analysis. Did the price beat the volume at weighted average price (VWAP) or not?

Updating the PMS is boring but not as easy as it seems. Companies go through all sorts of corporate actions, such as dividends and stock splits. Those corporate actions have an impact on the consistency...