Does anyone have experience with this product? What can it do that makes it an "institutional" product instead of a "retail" product?
my old boss was trying to bring Apama to my old firm and got shot down it is good but if there is a fault in the logic it can F up real bad!
I think the main issue with it being an institutional product and not a retail was price and ease of use to the user.
that is correct henderson the costs are too high for retail. I think you have to pay a fee to use each exchange which is quite high in the thousands...
If you do a search for apama there is an entire thread that will answer most of your questions. Read the one titled "apama vs streambase."
I'm a Quantitative Strategist at a hedge fund, and an Apama user. I think what makes it "institutional" is that it is extremely powerful and flexible (but therefore quite complex). It was apparently developed to gather and process intelligence in real-time for the "war on terror"....whatever! I probably only use about 10% of it's capability. I use it to capture level 2 tick data, feed a predictive engine I've connected to it that''s written in Java, and run the execution strategies to act on the generated signals. There are about 6 steep learning curves to climb, but now that I've done it, I can make changes to my strategies very quickly. The biggest mistake I made was doing it all myself. I would imagine that it's better with a team of at least 3 people. I'm very happy with the product, but don't have much hair left.
basiclly its the type of trader you are. institutional = big backing, limits based off position size (risk) v margin posted. you are likely to be doing v much more volume and in house tech support. retail - low margin, low volume, cuts on costs, part timer or learning.
apama is a grossly overpriced POS... its for morons who don't know how to do shit... there are tons of other tools out there in the free-ish range (<50K p.a.)... including top flight rules engine... in the same category as apama, ie tools for morons who can waste the bank's money, there is portware, kdb and dj analytics for instance... good ways to throw a couple $100Ks p.a. out the window for no good reason )))))))))))))) perhaps i shld start a thread on corporate waste on algo stuff......... (but i won't: we need these morons for $$$ to go round...) {checking out}