Advanced Trading Apr - 2012

In the Apr 2012 issue of “Advanced Trading ” magazine , I found these points . quotes worth noting down :

Exchanges have announced plans to roll out measures aimed squarely at eradicating the technique of
quote-stuffing, a common strategy in which high-frequency traders rapidly fire off, and then cancel, millions of orders as a means to probe the direction in which the market is heading.
Under Dodd-Frank, hedge funds and other private fund advisers that manage $150 million in assets or more will have to fill out Form PF, the brainchild of regulators who are looking to prevent seismic events like the demise of LTCM
Stephen Davenport : It looks like Dodd-Frank could be put on permanent hold, and regulators are probably not going to hit their July deadline. My understanding is that they’re thinking if they can postpone it until after the election, and the Republicans end up controlling the House and Senate, it might never get implemented to the degree that it was originally intended. This is why financials are doing so well recently.
George Michaels CEO of G2 Systems to a buy side business head : “All your VWAP orders are being worked by the sell side, and the algorithms are moving the large block of orders — so why are you paying guys half a million a year to sit around and scratch their noses?”
So what skills does the new breed of buy-side trader need to successfully supplant yesterday’s order taker? In the good old days, an MBA was the degree de rigueur. In these days programming and quantitative skills are imperative for a trader.
A large global asset management firm’s header trader says,that everyone he’s added to the trading team in the past five years has either been a quantitative analyst or a developer.
How will the buy side trader look like in a few years from now ? Will he be needed at all ? There will be firms that don’t need the overhead of five guys with Bloomberg terminals on a fancy trading desk with a nice view of downtown Dallas. That’s a thing of the past.