Every year, I like to decompress a bit and take a break. Usually, I like to go scuba diving – the dive sites I like are usually far removed from email, Twitter, Facebook, etc. and it gives me a chance to actually unplug, defrag, and think a bit.

This year, the family went to Grand Cayman to experience some of the world’s best diving. Within Grand Cayman is Hell, a small township dedicated to tourism and aptly named given the attached photo.

We visited Hell in between dives, and rather than make my ex-wife room reservations or send out postcards, I thought I’d amplify a few predictions I’d made earlier after the benefit of some quality thinking time. So here they are:

1. Cloud based services will finally hit Wall Street in 2011. It makes a lot of sense for firms to offer shared access to things like market data and to provide elastic resource for its manipulation. It doesn’t make any sense to deploy these types of services on Amazon, or an equivalent (does one exist?), because it’s just too expensive.
2. The Consolidated Audit Trail, as currently defined by the SEC, will never see the light of day. Instead, we will see the modification of OATS to provide the functionality required to dupe people into believing that the SEC is actually adding value.
3. NASDAQ will offer cloud-based, pre-trade risk assessment following their acquisition of FTEN. It won’t be cloud based and most firms will opt for their own in-house solution.
4. Intelligence organization will take a new approach to correlating on-grid data with off-grid data to answer questions like, “We saw STUX-net go from this country to that country, but we don’t know who got the USB drives inside.” This will lead to a new effort to combine event processing, analytics, and in memory databases using very large clusters.
5. And finally, I’m probably going to use Twitter a lot less. I hardly used it at all on vacation. And surprisingly, I didn’t miss it one bit.

Thanks for reading!

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