Share-Guide and APL Club Germany

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 60

Guide-Share APL Day with APL-Club of Germany¶

Berlin, 12th October 1995

Introduction¶

Firstly, many thanks to Dieter Lattermann for inviting Duncan Pearson & myself as visitors to this joint session of Guide-Share (Europe) and the APL-Club of Germany. It gave us a good insight into the way APL is moving in Germany, as well as the opportunity to meet lots of keen and thoughtful APLers.

I think the most important message we brought back is that OS/2 (and with it APL2/OS2) is solidly established in continental Europe, and that if interpreters like APL+Win and Dyalog/W are to make any headway here, they really need to push forward with their APL2 compatibility. There seems to be a lot of interest in IBM's view of co-operative processing, with several papers discussing real applications built using mainframe DB2 databases with an OS/2 front-end in APL2.

Presenting Election Statistics¶

Hans-Georg Felinks, City of Dortmund

This was the only paper of the day presented entirely in (idiomatic) German, and I am sorry that I failed to appreciate most of the jokes. The subject matter was most interesting, being a description of an APL2 application for analysing and presenting local election results in Dortmund. The scope of the system was 606 voting districts, with 458,000 people entitled to vote. The system processed the results as they arrived in a central IMS database, aiming for "midnight publication" of ward figures, comparison with eve-of-poll forecasts, demographic trends and so on.

Selection and categorisation was driven by a set of 'mask arrays' generated by the APL2 program, and the results could be tabulated or graphed in a variety of ways, including a colour-shaded map of the Dortmund area.

Apologies for not giving a better account of this one — it would be good to have a full write-up of this work in a future Vector.

Managing Futures and Options with APL2¶

Alfred Wettach, Allianz Investment Company

This talk described a large administrative ("Back-office") APL2 system which has been operational at Allianz since March 1994. It currently handles Futures and Options — they are working to integrate Swaps. It is probably worth repeating Alfred's definition of what these actually are:

• Futures are agreements between two parties to make an exchange at a definite future date. The price is fixed now.
• Options give one of the parties to the deal the right to buy or sell a particular good for a fixed price within a given period (USA) or at a given date (EU). You pay a small amount now for the option, and perhaps you may pay the rest in the future.

The key point is that 98% of these deals are never exercised! A company which has a large number of such "derivative assets" on the books clearly has a tough job knowing whether it is in profit or loss at any given moment, as it must make assumptions about the likely uptake of options, and estimate the unrealised asset values accordingly. This is where Nick Leeson came unstuck!

The situation is complicated by legal restrictions, and by the crucial difference between an option to sell (known as a "short" position) and an option to buy (when a trader is "long" instead). If you are "long" you just risk the option price — you do not have to buy; however if you are "short" you must sell if your opposite number wishes to buy. Clearly this can be a much bigger risk if you have offered something you don't actually have.