Exploiting arbitrage opportunities in the commodities markets is an especially obvious form of proprietary trading.
"We see some of the most popular download services actively engaging in a form of guerilla slavery: using proprietary formats, closed system media players and proprietary portable devices," Taylor says.
Proprietary trading is harder to defend when it is sheltered by a government guarantee but any bank that acts as a marketmaker between buyers and sellers will end up taking some form of proprietary risk.Faced with this untidy set of choices, a sensible philosophy would not make hard-and-fast judgments about what businesses belong together.
All of your firms are involved in some form of proprietary trading, or using your own capital to make financial bets, not unlike hedge funds and other private investors.
In effect, these banks benefit from unfair, nontransparent and dangerous government subsidies that encourage reckless gambling – most notably in the form of "proprietary trading" (jargon for placing bets on which way markets will move).
Then comes the umami, in the form of proprietary Umami Master Sauce (its ingredients include but are not limited to soy, seaweed, tamari and miso) and Umami Dust, which involves ground-up dried porcinis and dried fish heads.
But proprietary assets still abound — more often today in the form of proprietary data.
Software can assist in these tasks, with the majority of stress analysis performed with the support of some form of proprietary software.
This can be in the form of proprietary intellectual property (Ayasdi), access to scarce supply, creation of high switching costs and network effects.
Most of these systems make use of some form of proprietary software, and take advantage of local network connections to offer some pretty sophisticated capabilities like the groupware of Lotus Notess, or the integrated calendaring Microsoft's Exchange.
