cheers, and to bmferguson as well!
i know its not big money, pays for another grunt on a desk and headcount's hard to get though but thats another story...
its just that those costs add up, and for the wrong reasons...
give u an example, portware, at this bank am looking at right now, licence is $750K p.a., for some reason to the guy who signed a year or 2 ago, that made sense... today they've realized that the guts don't deliver as expected and are redeveloping all in-house (at a cost), therefore only keeping this turd for the GUI (to simplify)... thats a pretty expensive GUI at this rate... i'd say, if u want your algo / quant etc desk to make more $$$, start throwing away your portware, kbd, apama and other stupidly priced tools, stay away from the fidessa guys and whoever co-sponsors their "seminars"...
bmfergie, of course am not going to build u a solution, am busy enough building mine and we're v.likely not missing the same bricks anyway... but did u look at the cqg toolkit for instance? (thats not what i am using but i saw pretty good stuff there, from mates of mine, quants at another bank) and the hotbridge guys may have some other of the bricks u need for instance...