Celent says that both the IT world and the financial markets long assumed that the latter had to employ the former in a “batch mode.” A firm would process trades through the day, recording these in a data base. Then at the end of the day, programs that could manipulate this data in search of exploitable patterns would operate on the day’s results as a batch. That is the mode of operation that “has become increasingly obsolete.”

The Mathema report is full of cautions, and indeed adopts a quite generally gloomy tone. The markets, it tells us, don’t lend any credence to the political fixes that have been offered for the eurozone and especially for its peripheral players. If the fixes did have credibility, then the PIIGS’ 10-year government benchmark yields would have been falling significantly of late vis-à-vis the 10 year German Bund yield. But there has been no such fall.