Hot Topics in Tech. Today we are featuring Alexander Lamb, Head of Business Development at The Technancial Company. Alex was previously a guest in March 2016. (You can access that episode here.)

• Risk Management and AI: effective or ??? Its penetration into the business world has brought with it new services which aim to help automate and speed up a range of activities, including financial risk management.
• Wall Street next tech frontier is hacking into emotions of traders. Banks have already set up big-data teams to harvest insights from the terabytes of customer information they possess. Now they are looking inward to see whether they can improve operations and limit losses in their biggest cost center: employees.
• Tech is driving consolidation in the exchange space. CBOE Holdings Inc., agreed to acquire Bats Global Markets Inc. for about $3.2 billion to expand into stocks, ETFs and currencies trading.
• Exchanges defeat appeal of U.S. high-frequency trading lawsuits - A federal appeals court on Friday rejected an investor's attempt to revive lawsuits accusing major U.S. exchanges of selling early access to market data to high-frequency traders, the subject of Michael Lewis' 2014 best-seller "Flash Boys."

The Inbox: In which the listeners take control

• Question from Andrew Simmons: There is lots of acronym soup in trading tech. Two terms I have heard bandied about quite a bit are EMS and OMS. Can you explain these terms and maybe their similarities or differences?
• Question from JVigs: Are there any independent third party services I can use to analyze my margin and options buying power? This seems like a bit of a dark art these days in the options market. I do not really agree with the numbers generated by my broker and it would be nice to have some data in my corner. So much effort is devoted to trading in milliseconds but this important part of the market remains relatively untapped. Recommendations please. Great hit with Howard from StockTwits. Keep it up.