Everybody knows that the prices for derivatives software are dropping faster than share prices for technology stocks. But things may have finally hit bottom with Glassco Park's long-awaited release of its FinancialCad product. Priced at $395 for a single-user version (Windows, Windows 95 or NT), it offers 280 industry-standard risk measurement routines for an exhaustive array of derivative types-which works out to $1.41 a model. Two years ago when the company began showing beta versions of the product at trade shows, it was priced close to $2,000.

"Nobody has ever made this kind of comprehensive financial engineering at such low cost," boasts company president Robert Park. "When an individual can buy it with his credit card, it will be pretty hard for companies to use high cost as an excuse for not having adequate derivatives pricing tools." Fully functional trial versions of FinancialCad are downloadable on the company's web site, http://www.financialcad.com, which also contains some educational comments on a wide variety of different models.

The product goes several leagues beyond the company's earlier spreadsheet add-in. It has scores of new functions in the exotic options arena as well as pre-built calculators and a variety of term structure models. It also markets a developer's product for $529 that permits users to bypass the spreadsheet altogether and link to the product's math library for programming in Visual Basic and Visual C++. Commercial development and runtime licenses are also available.

"Rogue Catcher" is not the name of the latest risk monitoring software from Mellon Bank, but that is its purpose. The bank has unveiled Investment Monitor, to be released later this year, which allows Mellon clients to sleep well at nights, thanks to specially tailored rules that test portfolio holdings, risk statistics, transactions and asset allocation. Much of the beta and pre-beta testing of Investment Monitor was done along with Mellon custodial client the Common Fund, which lost $138 million because one trader at one of its management companies violated the authorization for arbitrage only and made directional plays. Investment Monitor would have caught him the day he submitted trades to the custodian.

The Asian tech job market is booming. "The demand for good derivatives systems people is extremely active now," according to a recruiter specialist in this marketplace, Tony Rodriguez, of International Computer Professional Associates (ICPA). "In general people with New York or London experience can command salaries in the $150,000­$250,000 range, plus bonus. Current demand is strongest in risk management, trading and sales," says Rodriguez. Hottest spot in the Pacific by far is Tokyo, where the market is up 50 percent this year. Check out http://www.icpa.com if you're interested.

How did the world cope with an explosion of FX global volume, which soared from $620 billion to $1.26 trillion in the last six years? With technology, according to the U.S. Foreign Exchange Committee, which has just issued a code of conduct for FX back offices. The committee considered the many causes of losses after a transaction has been captured into the system by sales/trading personnel, either electronically or with written tickets. There is a pretty long list of possible malfunctions before settlement and reconciliation, such as compensation for incorrect settlement, losses from managing incorrect positions, or credit exposures. The document, entitled Management of Operations Risks in FX, isolates 50 best practices that are likely to lower the probability of losses. Among these: timely confirmations and reconciliations, standing settlement protocols, automated and integrated transaction processing, online global credit monitoring and netting systems. Finally the committee scrutinized technology risks, in particular the shift from mainframes to client-servers, and the ability of the latter to handle all facets of the FX workflow reliably.

Which market most needs but lacks derivatives pricing tools? Why, electricity, according to Dragana Pilipovic, president of SAVA Risk Management, a firm that has just given birth to software called the Electricity Forward Price Curve Builder. "Broker quotes and the new NYME contracts cannot meet all the needs of all traders," claims Pilipovic, who says her product will combine math, statistics and trader instinct to generate a reasonable forward price curve for electricity. Currently in beta with Cinergy Corp, the Cincinnati-based utility, it should be available commercially this month.