[dannywoodz]

Agreed. The system I worked on had scheduled releases every two weeks, with a smattering of emergency releases in between. In some cases, simply being able to reliably price a given trade put you ahead of the competition, particularly in the exotics space, and could make or break a deal.

The big problem with a system like this is that, when faced with the do-it-right/do-it-fast dilemma, do-it-fast is what wins. Too much of this can yield a brittle system as hacks pile on top of each other, so it helps to be able to slide 'proper' fixes into the trailing dev/test cycles. A flexible platform/language helps, too.