We live in exponential times, as one of those catchy videos circulating on YouTube and Facebook was proudly boasting. And no area of our lives abides to this motto as much and as clearly as the evolution of the processing power available at our fingertips. Moore’s law - and those who toil incessantly to actually keep it relevant - is partially to blame for this, but the real cause is our endless pursuit of progress, our fascination with more, bigger, faster things, all these adjectives we usually associate with better. In this monotonically increasing evolution though, a problem arises when we hit an unsurpassable wall, when we need to decide for instance whether better means faster or more.

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Electronic trading is the daily challenge for execution excellence in trading and risk management, utilizing various technologies with the constant strives to improve; always aiming for perfection. Globalization created global markets that compete for market share, correlations and dependencies between different markets grew as fast as technologies and service agreements could cope with.

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Transactions done by automated systems on electronic markets increased in volume significantly, over the past few years, getting to the point where they are dwarfing the rest on all major exchanges. As an example, the volume of trades made from co-location (systems located in the proximity of the exchange) went up from 10% in 2010 to over 50% in 2016. Naturally, a question arises: "Why is there so much automated trading"? One of the answers might be that investors are optimistic.

Financial Information eXchange protocol is a message layout used to exchange financial information. It was designed for real-time exchange of information related to securities transactions and markets. When it was initially developed, it was intended to automate a communication that was done via phone. The first ever communication via FIX was between Fidelity Investments and Salomon Brothers. One of the reasons for using machine-readable communication was to reduce the amount of errors caused by human factors.

According to the Scrum Alliance, “Scrum is an Agile framework for completing complex projects. Scrum was originally formalized for software development projects, but it works well for any complex, innovative scope of work. The possibilities are endless. The Scrum framework is deceptively simple.

When we first started working on our project at work, we searched for an easy-to-use tool that would help us write readable and concise tests. We chose Spock, because in combination with Groovy it provided exactly what we needed: readable BDD-style tests that we could write fast and change easily. Keep in mind that Spock can also be used in combination with Java, but has a great synergy with Groovy. All the examples in this article are written in Groovy, but fear not! If you are a little bit familiar with Java, you will see that you can read Groovy code. Because our project’s tests examples would have been too complicated for a Spock introduction, I have chosen examples from a kata I coded to practice TDD.

“Self-discipline has a bigger impact on academic performance than intellectual talent” – This is the quote that may give us all, regular people, some hope that we can still accomplish great things, be the expert in our field of work or that the power to change is in fact in our own control.

First of all I should begin with what I do: I manage a 40+ IT consulting, training and software development company, and I work as trainer and consultant for customers in Romania and abroad, dealing mostly with Cloud technology.

After fifteen years working in IT, of which ten outside Romania, one of the major conclusions I have reached is that the work-life balance does not exist. In fact, I believe you have also reached this conclusion if you worked in the industry, even for a few months. What is this endless run for the doubtful concept turning into?

Customers are always on our minds and we often speak about how to keep them at the center of our attention at all times, about how to step in their shoes and how to win their hearts. However, we seldom do remember to also sharpen our blades for the fight against our worst enemy, our inner selves.