For those keeping an eye on the CFTC (and that pretty much means everyone), the last fortnight has provided some volatile exchanges. First there was a call from a US senator for the replacement of CFTC chairman Gary Gensler, Gensler then fired off a salvo regarding significant underfunding of the regulators budget; swiftly followed by a speech calling for Dodd-Frank to go beyond U.S. shores. In somewhat less fiery mode the chairman ended the week with applause for a Senate vote on funding for resources to oversee markets.

Meanwhile it was cheering to hear that an academic study has concluded that HFT helps market structure and liquidity. Click Here for more details.

Other industry news from Zeptonics which claims to have created the world's fastest switching device at 130 nanoseconds; NovaSparks launched a pure FPGA order book builder; Enyx's FPGA platform is to support Chi-X Canada; and Intilop implemented its 76 ns TOE on a new full system FPGA platform.

Trying times for NASDAQ OMX which suggested a $40 million compensation fund for Facebook losses only to raise fierce objections from NYSE Euronext; and for Morgan Stanley which was hit with a $5 million fine for non-competitive trades.

Happier news from SGX which is set to become the first Asian exchange with hubs in Chicago and London; Citi launched an algo platform in Turkey; First Derivatives partnered with Moscow based FOREX CLUB to provide FX market access; and FFastFill connected to the new NYSE Liffe Universal Clearing Platform.

Thomson Reuters launched a bespoke version of Eikon for the Chinese market; KVH marketed TipOff latency measurement system in Asia; BT launched Assure Analytics for big data; with more big data news from Talend whose solution now supports Apache Hadoop.