NYSE to open up facilities for testing ahead of Twitter IPO

By John McCrank

NEW YORK (Reuters) - NYSE Euronext said on Friday it would offer testing next weekend for trading firms planning to take part in Twitter's market debut, highlighting an industry-wide focus on risk controls after a spate of technology-related snafus in recent years.

The initial public offering of microblogging site Twitter is the most highly anticipated since Facebook's IPO last year, when software problems at Nasdaq OMX Group resulted in a chain of events that market making firms said cost them a combined $500 million (309.2 million pounds).

Before Twitter disclosed on Tuesday it would list on the New York Stock Exchange, analysts had said the Facebook IPO problems would likely weigh against Nasdaq's chances of winning the listing and the prestige that comes with it.

A date for the IPO has not yet been disclosed, but it is expected before the end of November.

NYSE said in the note to traders on Friday that in preparation for Twitter's market debut, firms could test their trading algorithms on October 26, when it would make available all of its production customer gateway connections for order flow.

The Big Board operator said additional details would be provided early next week, including registration details.

The Facebook incident was one of a number of high-profile technology-related problems that have roiled markets and weighed on investor confidence in recent years, placing a bigger focus on operational risk by regulators and market participants.

Nasdaq agreed to pay a $10 million penalty for the Facebook errors, the largest amount ever levied against a stock exchange, and also voluntarily said it would pay up to $62 million to compensate firms harmed in the May 18, 2012, market debut.

TRYING TO BREAK THE SYSTEM

Preventing technology snafus, and how to better deal with glitches that do happen, was a major focus at a market structure conference held by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) on Thursday.

The conference came one day after regulators fined trading firm Knight Capital, now part of KCG Holdings Inc, $12 million to settle charges related to an error last year that sent millions of unintended orders into the market.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said that at the time, Knight did not have appropriate risk controls in place to prevent the errors and that the firm failed to conduct adequate reviews of the effectiveness of its controls.

Exchanges and brokers have been re-examining their approaches to testing the robustness of their systems, Eric Noll, head of Nasdaq's transaction business, said at the SIFMA conference.

"Not only conformance testing - does the software do what we designed it to do - but what happens to the software if we try to break it?"

Deliberately putting bad orders or code into the system in a testing environment allows the exchange to then test what would happen to the rest of its systems, helping it make better plans to react to such a situation, he said.

STOPPING THE BLEEDING MORE QUICKLY

Several trading firm executives at the conference said U.S. markets actually function better than ever, and chalked up the drop in investor confidence to the increased media attention surrounding trading glitches.

The data shows that in equities, clearly erroneous trades - a proxy for system coding issues where capacity limits or order routing limits have been exceeded - are down 55 percent from May 2010, said Tom Gira, head of market regulation the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.

But the speed that automation has brought to the markets needs to be taken into account, he said at the SIFMA conference.

"What's different about today's market than, say, 10 years ago, is that even if you do have less snafus, they are so much more amplified now than they were before and the challenge is now, how do you stop the bleeding more quickly in such a quick market," he said.

There are thirteen U.S. equity exchanges, 44 alternative trading systems, and a handful of other large non-exchange trading venues competing for order flow that brokers connect to.

The renewed focus on operational risk and having controls in place for when glitches do happen, comes after a software bug in August paralyzed thousands of Nasdaq-listed stocks market-wide for three hours. That happened just days after a technical problem at Goldman Sachs sent a flood of erroneous orders to the U.S. equity options markets. And on August 6, BATS Global Markets faced an outage that lasted nearly an hour.

(Reporting by John McCrank; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/nyse-open-facilities-testing-ahead-twitter-ipo-193906151--sector.html
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Banksy Unveils A Ronald McDonald Sculpture In NYC

'Better Out Than In' Continues to Unfold

Posted by: Trent on October 16, 2013|

On Monday we learned that mysterious street artist Banksy orchestrated an art stunt on the streets of NYC over the weekend that no one knew what was really going on until after it was all said and done. Today we get to see the latest art stunt that Banksy has unleashed upon the Big Apple as his ongoing Better Out Than In art residency in NYC rolls on. Banksy has been spray painting art pieces all over NYC in the past couple of weeks but has, today, unveiled a new sculpture as part of his art residency. Ronald McDonald is the subject of Banksy‘s latest art piece, check it out in full below and see what Banksy has come up with now.

For the 16th day of “Better Out Than In,” Banksy has tackled a familiar subject: corporate business and McDonald’s in particular. Dubbed Shoeshine, the new piece is the controversial street artist’s latest commentary on big business and depicts “the powerful figure of Ronald McDonald waving impassively as his ridiculously oversized clown shoes are buffed to a fine shine.” Appearing today in the South Bronx, Shoeshine is set to make its way to a different McDonalds around the city at lunchtime for the next week as its fiberglass shoe is shined by a “real live boy.”

The sculpture is impressive, particularly since it comes with a real live “boy”. It’s clear that Banksy has quite a few tricks up his sleeve and he is clearly having fun with this project. I’m sure how it works logistically to haul this huge sculpture all over town but I do like the concept. I must admit, I’m really jealous that NYC is getting all of the fun. I doubt that Banksy will bring his show to LA anytime soon but even tho it’s not as fun as being there, getting to watch this art residency unfold online is kind of neat. Love it or hate it, Banksy is really turning the art world on its head. It looks like Banksy is trying to be the Andy Warhol of our generation. I think he’s doing a pretty decent job thus far.

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Source: http://www.pinkisthenewblog.com/2013-10-16/banksy-unveils-a-ronald-mcdonald-sculpture-in-nyc
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Here Be Dragons: London Review

The Bottom Line

Never mind the Balkans.

Venue

London Film Festival screening, October 10

Director

Mark Cousins

Made for around $16,000 on a cheap hand-held camera, Here Be Dragons is the latest highly personal “essay film” from Mark Cousins, a former director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival turned globe-trotting micro-budget auteur. Shot last year during a short working holiday in Albania, this free-associating documentary initially promises to illuminate a mysterious Balkan backwater rarely seen on screen. Instead, it reveals rather too much about its author, his brainy reading habits, his airline meals, and his random thoughts on culture and politics. Cousins may even have invented a new cinematic form here: film as a series of Facebook status updates.

The film’s austere visual grammar will be familiar to anyone who saw the director’s previous idiosyncratic but scholarly documentaries on cinema, most notably his epic 2011 TV series The Story of Film: An Odyssey and this year’s well-received Cannes entry, A Story of Children on Film. Over a slow-moving montage of mostly static single-shot tableaux, Cousins waxes philosophically in his sleepy, melodious, softly undulating Northern Irish brogue. The effect is hypnotic and soothing, but not enough to sustain a thin piece of work like this. Here Be Dragons has just premiered at the London Film Festival, where it is competing in the documentary section. The director’s track record should ensure interest from further festivals and niche TV networks.

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Here Be Dragons does not include naked shots of Cousins like last year’s navel-gazing travelogue What Is This Film Called Love? But it does feature him splashing around in a Scottish loch in a kilt, for no clear reason. Later, wandering randomly around Tirana, he becomes mildly fixated with Albania’s former Communist dictator Enver Hoxha and the crumbling concrete pyramid built as his intended mausoleum. He even reads a scathing poem about Hoxha over an interminable shot of industrial wasteland, which reverses midway through. The impact of such cut-price arty flourishes will depend how seriously you take Cousins getting slightly cross about a dead tyrant’s human rights abuses 30 years too late.

Cousins repeatedly reminds us he is in Tirana to see every Albanian movie made in the last five years, and he makes politely anxious noises about the imperilled state of the national film archive, which he finds rotting away in a fungus-ridden basement. And yet he includes just a tiny handful of brief snippets from the archive, with barely any historical or biographical context, before promptly returning to his own navel-gazing tourist musings. Given free rein by producer Don Boyd, who previously worked with the legendary British arthouse director Derek Jarman, Cousins simply rambles away like a man with no unpublished thoughts.

Frustratingly, a more conventional documentary about Enver Hoxha could have been genuinely fascinating, as could a well-researched film about Albania’s impact on global cinema. After all, this tiny nation’s diaspora includes John and James Belushi, Eliza Dushku and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Tom Perrotta. Even during the deep freeze of Cold War isolation, the British screen comic Norman Wisdom enjoyed cult fame in Albania, beloved for his proletarian everyman roles. Since the fall of Communism, the local film scene has witnessed a minor renaissance with domestic hits like Slogans and Amnesty. Hoxha’s speeches even featured as a decoy device in Spike Lee’s 2006 heist thriller Inside Man.

Does any of this basic movie-fan trivia figure in Here Be Dragons? Of course not. The director is far too busy serving up his own learned, loopy and unashamedly self-absorbed observations. There are worthy blueprints for this kind of discursive documentary essay, of course, particularly the work of the late French pioneer Chris Marker and – more recently – Patrick Keiller’s Robinson trilogy. But those films have a formal rigor and intellectual vigor that Cousins is either unable or unwilling to deliver in this lightweight jumble of holiday snapshots. Curious viewers will learn more about Albania by spending an hour on Wikipedia.

Production companies: HiBrow Productions, Ska-Ndal

Producer: Don Boyd

Director: Mark Cousins

Writer: Mark Cousins

Cinematographer: Mark Cousins

Editor: Mark Cousins

Sales company: HiBrow Productions

Unrated, 73 minutes

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/thr/reviews/film/~3/AbVE-iimDCk/be-dragons-london-review-649389
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Tom Hanks Starrer 'Saving Mr. Banks' Closes BFI London Film Festival

LONDON ­-- The world premiere of John Lee Hancock's Saving Mr. Banks, starring Tom Hanks, Emma Thompson, Colin Farrell and Jason Schwartzman, brought the 57th edition of the BFI London Film Festival to an end Sunday, Oct. 20.

The movie tells the tale of Walt Disney's battle to persuade PL Travers to bring her much-loved Mary Poppins tales to the big screen via his studio.

The modern day Walt Disney Company, which fully bankrolled the production of Saving Mr. Banks after BBC Films developed the script, "entrusted" the movie to the BFI LFF organizers to mark its world debut in the British capital.

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Hanks, whose has bookended this year's shindig after the festival opened with Captain Phillips, again took to the red carpet to support a movie's debut on British soil. He was joined by fellow cast members Thompson, Farrell, Ruth Wilson and British screenwriter Kelly Marcel.

At the closing ceremony, which was beamed around the U.K. to 20 screens in the Odeon exhibition chain live from London's Odeon Leicester Square, autograph hunters gathered to cheer Hanks and the other attending celebs.

BFI chief executive Amanda Nevill welcomed the guests and thanked sponsors for their financial support for the festival and said the close of the festival marked the start of a year of movie programming for the BFI.

Clare Stewart, marking the end of her sophomore edition as the BFI's head of exhibition and distribution, took to the stage exclaiming that the only way to make the close of festival bearable was with the honor of hosting the world premiere of Saving Mr. Banks.

Stewart thanked Disney for supporting the premiere and the producers before introducing the film's director Hancock.

Hancock brought his cast and crew to the stage to cheers and whoops with big adulation reserved for Hanks, Farrell, Brit lead producer Alison Owen and Emma Thompson.

Thompson leapt across the stage armed with her own microphone and did a two-minute humorous turn to the audience.

She suggested London should put Hanks on "the fourth plinth" asking anyone from the British capital to explain the reference to the Trafalgar Square statue spaces to Americans. She drew laughs for saying even for someone as "unsentimental" even this film had "made me eyes itch."

She also exclaimed Disney seemed to have brought "the entire corporation" to the British capital for the event.

She noted despite the anticipated difficulty of making a "rather independently minded film about an old lady" with the "behemoth" corporation Disney, they had all an amazing time doing it.

Thompson said no one in the audience was to worry over the sight of her with a microphone promising not to waste any time thanking endless people because she was excited to see the film in London.

She then leapt off the stage to huge applause with the rest of the talent and Stewart in tow.

The gala event for Hancock's film marked the end of Stewart's vision for the festival, complete with her introduction of an Official Competition section now bedded down in her second event in charge.

On Saturday night (Oct. 19), organizers garnered headlines and a coup of sorts with the surprise appearance of Johnny Depp at the event's standalone film awards ceremony to present Sir Christopher Lee with his BFI Fellowship, the highest honor the British Film Institute can bestow.

STORY: Pawel Pawlikowski's 'Ida' Wins Grand Prix at Warsaw International Film Festival 

The second Official Competition line-up designed to recognize "inspiring, inventive and distinctive filmmaking" saw the best film nod Saturday night go to U.K. based Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski's Ida.

The BFI London Film Festival, in partnership with American Express, drew over 500 guests for the 12 day event including more than 150 directors and over 110 actors for the 235 feature films plus screenings, masterclasses and events.

Kate Winslet, Josh Brolin, Jason Reitman, Tom Hiddleston, Jesse Eisenberg, Alex Gibney, Greg Wise, Robin Wright, Ari Folman, Anna Kendrick, Emily Mortimer, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Charlie Cox, Jodie Whittaker, Christian Cooke, Annabelle Wallis, Tahar Rahim, David Thewlis and Terry Gilliam have all been spotted around town at various events.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/thr/film/~3/tXAonUusrWc/story01.htm
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New Teamsters Boss: 'There's Going to Be Real Sea Change'

Big changes are ahead for the powerful Teamsters Local 399 -- which provides many drivers and location managers for movie and TV companies -- after Steve Dayan on Tuesday won a bitter battle to unseat Leo Reed, who had held the post of business agent for 24 years.

“We’re going to reorganize this union from top to bottom,” Dayan told The Hollywood Reporter. “There’s going to be a real sea change in the staff; the whole composition of the union is going to change dramatically.”

“We want to better serve the members and the community and create jobs for our members,” added Dayan. “That is the priority.”

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Dayan, who has also served on the California Film Commission, was Teamster Local’s business agent for about four years until he was dismissed by Reed in July after announcing he would run for the union’s top job.

Dayan ran on a slate that called itself “399 Members First,” a platform charging that Reed had not been effective in negotiating contracts, stopping runaway production, organizing companies and making necessary, up-to-date changes.

“I ran a very clean campaign,” he said. “I ran on issues, not on attacking Leo as a person. That’s not what this election was about in my mind. What this is about is our industry is changing. We need to move into the 21st century. We need to be more progressive and find ways to create more jobs, lobby more vigorously for incentives for our state -- like other states have done -- and represent our members to the best of our ability.”

Besides Dayan, who received about 56 percent of the vote, his slate took four of the other six trustee seats. Wesley Ponsford was named president, while Gary Zuckerbrod, Chris Sell and Kenny Farnell were elected as trustees. Two other trustees elected -- vp Ed Duffy and recording secretary Rosie Falcon -- supported Reed.

STORY: Studios and Teamsters, Other Crafts Unions Reach Tentative Agreement 

Just over 2,300 ballots were cast by the union’s 4,500 members, including drivers, location managers, casting directors, animal wranglers and others located in southern California.

Dayan was recently on hand for a California legislative joint committee hearing held at SAG-AFTRA in Los Angeles, where guilds and business agreed to work together to stem runaway production and increase the amount of incentives the state offers to movie and TV productions.

Dayan promised that it's just the beginning: “We’re going to work, to make that relationship even stronger -- inter-guild, inter-union, inter-management. We need to do that if were going to get serious about creating employment in Los Angeles and in the state. We have to do these things. To me what’s been missing is dialogue. Its relationships. It’s bridge building and that’s what were going to be working to do going forward.”

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/thr/business/~3/20zwxTV6HEU/story01.htm
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Red Carpet Confidential: Cher Lloyd Admits She Got Work Done To Improve Her Self-Confidence

By Valerie Nome

I hang with the stars at the biggest events every night — and bring you all their juicy news and gossip.

British pop star Cher Lloyd shows off her new chompers Thursday at the Empire State Building while she is in the Big Apple promoting her single “I Wish“ featuring T.I.

And those new chompers have been a long dream of hers.

Watch: Cher Lloyd’s Sexy Music Video For “I Wish”

“I really want to go and get my teeth done,” she told me last December at the Z100 Jingle Ball in NYC. “Not veneers, but I want this gap gone. It’s terrible. I look at pictures, and I’m like ‘that would’ve been great if I didn’t look so goofy.’ [laughs]”

Here’s my pic with Ne-Yo and Cher during a Fruttare event in April where she offers a glimpse of her original pearly whites:

But now Cher, who shot to fame on The X Factor UK in 2010, couldn’t be more pleased with the results, even though she ultimately did opt for veneers.

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“I feel great,” the singer, 20, tells me Thursday. “I mean, I just spent a whole bunch of money on getting my teeth fixed. I should like them, and I do. [laughs] I’m feeling really, really good about myself. I’m glad that I got it done. It’s given me a lot more confidence, and I really do smile a lot now. I don’t think I ever do pictures with my mouth shut.”

Making the adjustment hasn’t been as extreme as one might imagine.

“Oh, no! I have an amazing dentist in L.A. He’s incredible, and he’s become a friend of mine, which is really nice. I’m really happy with the work I had done. I don’t feel like it’s so much of a major change, it’s just something I had to do for myself. I had to do it for me and my self-confidence.”

She adds, “In the industry I’m in now, I mean, I have to feel happy about myself. I have to!”

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Here’s a pic of Cher and I at the Empire State Building. It was so windy!:

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What do you think of Cher’s new smile? Do you prefer her before or after look? Tweet us @OKMagazine.

Source: http://okmagazine.com/get-scoop/red-carpet-confidential-cher-lloyd-admits-she-got-work-done-to-improve-her-self-confidence/
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These Literal Suicide Machines Exist Only To Destroy Themselves

It's one thing to build the most useless machine, but artist Thijs Rijkers takes things one big step further; his machines actively destroy themselves.

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