"Mr. Sporkin has built a team of more than 40 former traders, exchange experts, accountants and securities lawyers to sift through roughly 200 pieces of intelligence a day, distilling the hottest tips into a daily “intelligence report.” “It’s the central intelligence office for the whole agency,” Mr. Sporkin said. 
The overhaul came with an upgrade in technology. The hub of Mr. Sporkin’s outfit is a “market watch room,” replete with Bloomberg terminals and real-time stock pricing monitors that keep an eye on the markets. " .. I ALWAYS SAID ALL THEY NEED IS HOTTREND SINCE I SAW HUNDREDS OF INSTANCES OF INSIDER TRADING OVER THE YEARS USING THAT TOOL ALONE

Sent from iPad

NICE LIST ... ALL ABOUT LOSSES

David Harding, the head of one of the most successful hedge funds in the world
The 50-year-old runs Winton Capital, one of a secretive but influential band of computer-driven hedge funds that bet tens of billions of dollars on the world's financial markets using algorithms - mathematical instructions to computers - which consume everything from bond price moves to rainfall statistics.

For Harding, whose business attracts mainstream pension investors from the world over, all of human knowledge is relevant. Rivals are circling, and data is becoming an increasingly strategic weapon.

"The reason I did quant is that I didn't trust human judgment, including my own," says Mr. Jones, who left Goldman in 2010 after 23 years at the securities firm. "Relating the data to the [trading] outcomes made a lot of sense, but now that's a tough, tough game, with too many people and too much access to the data."

The 55-year-old Mr. Jones now is changing his tune—somewhat. The answer to improving the computer-driven stock-trading model is to weave in research from analysts, but to leave out the biases and emotions that can creep into final trading decisions.

With that goal, he and fellow alumni from Goldman, BlackRock Inc. BLK -2.43% and elsewhere have launched an investment firm called System Two Advisors L.P. It is underpinned by the idea that quants must keep evolving in a market dominated by powerful computers able to mine ever-expanding sources of information.

"For a few minutes, the most-watched stock in the world behaved like a malfunctioning computer program. The stock that convinced untold thousands of regular people with E-Trade accounts to get back into investing behaved according to rules that literally none of them understood, traded at volumes that none of them could conceive of and effectively followed contradictory orders from two sets of screaming robots. This is what future shock feels like.
Next time your dad asks you if he should invest in a hot tech IPO (because "you know all about this kind of stuff"), show him that video. Ask him how he'd feel to see his purchase flying down that ledger. Confident? Smart? Tiny and stupid? Then tell him, for god's sake, to find a new hobby."

"Between 11:49 and 11:54, something extraordinary happened. For about 300 seconds, the computers took over. The stock, which had dropped four points in the five minutes prior, froze in an incredibly narrow five-cent range while two sets of computers put in thousands upon thousands of bids against one another. On one side, the underwriters' computers were offering to buy hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stock to keep it from dipping below the crucial $38 level; on the other, high frequency traders were making veerrryyy slightly higher bids at just above $38 — $38.01, $38.02 — which they would sell, literally seconds later. … For a few minutes, the most-watched stock in the world behaved like a malfunctioning computer program. The stock that convinced untold thousands of regular people with E-Trade accounts to get back into investing behaved according to rules that literally none of them understood, traded at volumes that none of them could conceive of and effectively followed contradictory orders from two sets of screaming robots. This is what future shock feels like." via Chris (Twitter)

EclipseTrader is an  Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) application focused to the building of an online stock trading system, featuring shares pricing watch, intraday and history charts with technical analysis indicators, level II/market depth view, news watching, and integrated trading. The standard Eclipse RCP plug-ins architecture allows third-party vendors to extend the functionality of the program to include custom indicators, views or access to subscription-based data feeds and order entry.

I don't follow the standard language API argument as kdb+ has always had a c, java, c# api and they are very simple as they are just (de)serialization routines. Q is more intuitive to those who have studied functional/vector/set languages such as sql, lisp/scheme, haskell and matlab than more mainstream languages such as c, c# or java. Career friendly - my experience of learning Q was that it made me a better programmer; I've not heard of it hurting anyone's career.

I can speak about kdb+ functionality, performance and architecture.

Functionality - it is a virtual machine (byte code interpreter with super instructions), with built-in data types for vectors, dictionaries (hashtables) and tables. It has a bunch of built-in functions for some very powerful joins, and Q can sometimes look a bit like sql - e.g.
select size wavg price by sym from trade where date=2009.06.30, sym in `MSFT`CSCO, time within 10:00 11:00
There are feedhandlers out of the box but the c api is so simple it is quite straightforward to develop your own. And it hooks in to the common tools like excel and matlab.

Performance - Arthur Whitney has been optimizing the algorithms used in kdb+ for the last 30 years (Morgan Stanley and UBS had him for a few years to work on their trading systems). The executable is a couple of hundred kB, and is blazingly fast.

Architecture - It's a 64bit app and can be run in multithreaded, multiprocess and in a distributed mode on windows, solaris, linux and osx. It scales extremely well, although designs tend to revolve around concepts of in-memory database, on-disk database and gateways.

Last year there was a lot of talk about disk compression in the kdb+ community, but Kx chose to leave compression up to the file system software (e.g. ZFS gives a default compression ratio of about 3.3 for TAQ data) rather than implement a proprietary version themselves. Apparently another vendor had chosen to implement their own proprietary compression algorithm and was found to have slowly corrupted data, discovered some time after deployment.

There's a google group http://groups.google.com/group/personal-kdbplus and you can get a non-commercial version of kdb+ from kx.com. Kx has an internal group for commercial users.