High Frequency Trading, evolving applications and programming advances were key topics at "FPGA Advances in Market Trading" - a panel discussion held in New York City this week, hosted by Datacom Systems. The panel also included representation from Altera, ITRS, NovaSparks and Strike Technologies, and was moderated by Low-Latency.com.
More than 300 last week packed out the 
Fixnetix and its long-time customer Asperatus Capital have tapped NovaSparks to provide them with ultra-low-latency direct market data via its FPGA-accelerated Matrix appliances. That data is used to fuel HFT strategies.
Following on from the 
McObject with its eXtremeDB Financial Edition database has set record STAC-M3 benchmarks running on a hardware platform provided by Dell, Mellanox and Kove. eXtremeDB is just the second database to be featured in published STAC-M3 benchmarks, the other being Kx Systems' kdb+. 
The Nasdaq Stock Market plans to distribute its data feeds via a low-latency wireless service, and to offer wireless-delivered data to trading firms located at its Carteret, NJ co-location facility. Those plans are outlined in a filing that the exchange is required to make with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) relating to establishing fees for the services it plans to introduce.
Cisco Systems has teamed with a group of market data feed handler, latency management and integration vendors to produce an early set of real world latency statistics for its 
Judging by feedback from various industry people in the New York City region, the principle data centres serving the financial markets survived the onslaught of Monday night's Hurricane Sandy without any problems. One exception was a power issue at the 111 8th Avenue carrier hotel. Several data centres remain on generator power, though fuel deliveries appear to be happening as planned.
Managed futures fund 
Nope, the date is not April 1, though I had to double check. TraFXpure, a planned spot market for foreign exchange, has begun testing for an early 2013 go live, exercising a matching engine that features random latency execution.