I've been trying to extend this system to do equity derivatives for the last 18 months or so. It has been like teaching a brick to fly.Pretty good back office processing, lousy front office capabilities. Slow (performance wise) with too many bugs. Very non-object oriented design, even though it is written in Java. Lots of implementation inheritance which doesn't make sense in the finance domain (i.e., class FutureOption extends Future). Gross overuse of reflection (to the point that it is hard to tell how classes/methods are instantiated or invoked). Each new version/patch modifies hundreds of classes/interfaces.Anything in particular you want to know?

Hi Jim, i arrive pretty late on this issue. I'm currently evaluating Calypso ED + Developer unit. The idea is to integrate Calypso to ORC Trader (used for vanilla products), in order to have a unique data maintainance, and to develop exotic multiasset products in Calypso. We are a relatively small bank, do you think it is a feasible project ?Any other product (not as expensive as Sophis Risque) that can be sufficient to have a limited market making activity in equity structured products (multiasset, cliquet etc.).Thanks in advanceGF

Hi there - I know that the IRD traders at one bank hated the Front End to calypso and thus chuckedit on behalf of Murex - I have no idea what people think of Murex though..

GammaFlat,I am not familiar with the ORC Trader product or the extent to which it can be customized to use the Calypso DataServer, so I can't say whether your project proposal is feasible. I would strongly advise against any attempts to customize the Calypso product beyond the API Calypso provides for extension. Be forewarned that it is extremely difficult to change the system to do things that were not originally planned for. If you license the source code, do not attempt to provide your own implementation instead of Calypso's. The overuse of Java's reflection makes in nearly impossible to detect what you might break by the change.If you must, negotiate with Calypso for them to do all the changes. Don't try to save money by hoping you can do it yourself.

Jim,Can you or anyone point me to any technical information about Calypso that is freely available?Their website has a lot of marketing information but nothing substantive. I am looking at working on a Calypso project and keen to understand what that might mean before jumping in.

alohashirt,I left the company that was using Calypso a while ago, and no longer have access (nor do I care to have access) to anything beyond what is on their public website. I suggest that if you are working on some Calypso customizations that the company sponsoring this activity get you a login/password to Calypso's Tech Support area of their website.Jim

I'm not at that point. I may be making a career move that results in having significant exposure to Calypso and I am trying to get a sense of what that might be like. In theory it's all software and I'm not overly fussed about the tools I have to use. In practice I can be an opinionated, fussy, pain in the butt who would, say, smileat a role where I worked with tool X and whine about a role where I used tool Y day in day out. I'm interested in getting a sense as to how good/bad readable/spaghettimanagable/random the system is. The documentation (and the code) can be pointers to that.

Is there any place where I can get the hand on the Calyspso document for different classes ? or some kind of evaluation CD.Please comment.

Dear Sir,Is there any place I can get the CD or documentation for the Calypso ? Please let me know.Thanks,Jack

I'd encourage you to contact Calypso directly - they may be able to provide the same.