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Accelerating Wall Street 2010
May 11, 2010
Bank Systems & Technology Executive Summit 2010
October 3-6, 2010
Advanced Trading's Buy-Side Trading Summit 2010
October 17-19, 2010
Web Events:
Online Account Acquisition - What are the Drivers of Abandonment and Conversion?
March 30, 2010
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Low-Latency Not Required: Trading Stock for Food
February 05, 2010 @ 07:12 AM | By Greg MacSweeney
The famous New York steakhouse Smith & Wollensky's is allowing patrons to trade stock for food. A stock certificate for a share of Goldman Sachs will likely get you a juicy porterhouse or two. A share of Citi? Maybe a half a baked potato, according to this amusing audio clip from American Public Media
Algos Gone Wild (video)
February 03, 2010 @ 11:57 AM | By Melanie Rodier
In this video clip, Larry Tabb, founder and CEO of TABB Group, talks to Advanced Trading editor-in-chief Kerry Massaro about how likely it really is that an algo could go wild and bring down the market. He also focuses on new trends in the algorithmic trading space, including how new algos are now trying to execute blocks.
continued...Volatility Falls to Pre-Lehman Lows
January 07, 2010 @ 11:29 AM | By Greg MacSweeney
The VIX's decline to a 16-month low shows an absence of anxiety on Wall Street, reports Barrons.com's Bob O'Brien. Since the VIX reached a high in October 2008, the index has gradually declined. Although the VIX doesn’t tell you how to invest, it is a good indicator of where the market may head.
FBI May Be Eyeing SAC Capital
December 07, 2009 @ 10:23 AM | By Greg MacSweeney
After the Galleon insider trading arrests, the question is who is next. According to this Reuters article, SAC Capital Advisors -- Steven A. Cohen’s $12.9 billion Connecticut-based hedge fund — is under investigation by the FBI. SAC Capital has been investigated in the past, but no charges have ever been filed. This interesting, and long, article focuses on FBI Special Agent B. J. Kang who had had been at the center of a number of high profile securities cases, including the most recent case against Raj Rajaratnam and Galleon. Reuters investigative reporter Matthew Goldstein comments on the article and the SAC Capital investigation in this video.
Techy "Brains" Behind Madoff Ponzi Scheme Arrested
November 13, 2009 @ 11:29 AM | By Greg MacSweeney
One of the unanswered questions surrounding the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme was how did Madoff fool so many people for so long? Well, in addition to a lot of charm, charisma and leveraging his good reputation in the industry, Madoff also had help from a couple of programmers who allegedly falsified records to fool SEC inspectors. In fact, it’s playing out just like a Hollywood movie script. The face of the operation (Madoff) supposedly had help from a couple behind the scenes programmers who helped make the entire fraud possible. Slaving away in a back room somewhere on the 17th floor of the Lipstick building (the home of the Madoff firm at 53rd Street and 3rd Avenue), the duo created a false paper trail that helped fool regulators and calm investors. I wonder if they had pocket protectors, short sleeve dress shirts and wore big glasses? They probably didn’t, but I’m sure the movie director will have them wearing the stereotypical computer nerd attire when the blockbuster Hollywood film is made.
continued...Ex-Bear Stearns Money Managers Meet Jury
October 14, 2009 @ 10:49 AM | By Greg MacSweeney
Jurors are selected in the criminal fraud trial for two former Bear Stearns hedge fund managers, as seen in he following video from Reuters. Allegedly, while the two were busy promoting the $1.4 billion funds to clients, they sent emails to each other expressing doubts about the value of the funds. The case is being widely watched by Wall Street and by prosecutors to see if this type of case can withstand legal scrutiny.
But how will the jury be selected in this high-profile Wall Street Trial? Read on ...
Bet Your Life?
October 12, 2009 @ 10:19 AM | By Greg MacSweeney
Are Life Settlement Securities the next toxic asset? Less than one year after the credit crisis, firms such as Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse and JP Morgan are creating life settlement securities which are made by repackaging thousands of life insurance policies into tradable securities. Policyholders get money upfront at a fraction of the policy’s value and investors are paid the full value of the policy when the policyholder eventually dies. A no brainer for investors, right? However, DBRS, a credit ratings agency, says that no life settlement security has met its standards for “safety and security” to date. And critics say these products are just like the exotic investments that triggered the financial meltdown. Wall Street claims the products are safe, because they could be structured in a way that not many people of the same age or with the same illnesses would be included in the same security. Now where have we heard that before?
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Wall Street Facing New Tax Hit?
October 12, 2009 @ 10:02 AM | By Greg MacSweeney
Taxing Wall Street's financial transactions is back on the table. The Wall Street Journal’s John McKinnon says the populist notion is gaining support on Capitol Hill and with the IMF. With deficits running at record highs, lawmakers are looking for ways to raise revenues through taxes on everything from simple stock transactions to complex derivatives products. One argument in favor of the tax says that traders will think twice about taking a position to find a few cents profit if they are forced to pay a tax on all trades. Those against the move say that by imposing a tax, many traders will stop trading, thus removing much liquidity from the market. Both arguments may be true.
TGIF: The Cash Cow of High-Frequency Trading
October 02, 2009 @ 08:31 AM | By Greg MacSweeney
The Daily Show correspondent Samantha “Money Honey” Bee wants to tell her small investor friends about high-frequency trading before regulators outlaw it. Once again, Jon Stewart and his Daily Show crew have fun with the latest practice on Wall Street that is creating controversy and drawing attention from politicians and the public.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Cash Cow - High-Frequency Trading | ||||
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Lawmakers' Insider Advantage to Trading
September 18, 2009 @ 09:20 AM | By Greg MacSweeney
Company executives are forbidden from trading stocks using insider knowledge, but no such law exists to prevent members of Congress from doing so.
In fact, although members of Congress deny they use insider information for their own benefit, the numbers don't lie. Members of Congress outperform the market in good markets or bad. According to Alan Ziobrowski, a business professor at Georgia State University who studied more than 6,000 personal financial disclosures from members of Congress, on average "Senators make significant abnormal returns, some place around 1 percent above the market, 12 percent a year," he told American Public Media in this audio clip. American Public Media’s Steve Henn reports.
Fed Is Looking For a Few Good Traders
August 12, 2009 @ 11:06 AM | By Greg MacSweeney
The Fed is looking to hire traders, risk managers and analysts to help manage its investments, including roughly half-a-trillion dollars worth of mortgage-backed securities. But they won't make the same millions as Wall Streeters. American Public Media Marketplace’s Amy Scott reports.
New Rules Would Rein in Derivatives
August 03, 2009 @ 07:21 AM | By Greg MacSweeney
Democrats are working on a bill that would force most credit-default swaps onto exchanges where they can be monitored by the government. American Public Media’s Jeremy Hobson breaks down how these potential regulations would work and how they might help in this brief Marketplace audio clip.
China’s New GEB Exchange takes on Nasdaq to Nurture Tech
May 19, 2009 @ 10:21 AM | By Greg MacSweeney
China's new Growth Enterprise Board (GEB) hopes to reward the country's tech stars the same way Nasdaq helped companies like Google and eBay. But the GEB exchange comes with a different set of rules for investors, reports Scott Tong from American Public Media’s Marketplace Report.
BIDS Chief Mahoney Says Fragmentation Distorts Volume and Volatility
April 23, 2009 @ 10:16 AM | By Greg MacSweeney
Today it's harder to rely on share volume as a stock-market indicator than it used to be, Tim Mahoney, chief executive of BIDS Trading, explains to MarketWatch's Greg Morcroft. Mahoney says we are witnessing a transformation in the marketplace as “the role of the market maker has moved from a person to a computer.” Mahoney estimates that 70 percent of the volume in the markets today comes from computerized trading. He also discusses how the fragmentation in the markets is skewing the traditional volume numbers — from NYSE and Nasdaq — that investors traditionally relied on.
Ex-Deutsche Bank Trader Launches New Social Networking Site for Retail Traders
April 09, 2009 @ 05:19 PM | By Melanie Rodier
A few months ago, as the economy went into a tailspin and public sentiment turned against Wall Street, people angrily accused banks of taking advantage of Main Street.
The Latest on the Madoff Scandal
December 16, 2008 @ 10:13 AM | By Penny Crosman
As Wall Street tries to recover from the shock of the $50 billion Madoff Securities fraud case, new details are emerging about how the scheme worked, the federal investigation of Bernard Madoff and his firm, and how investors all over the world have been affected. The media usually benefits from tragedies such as these and surely some journalism career will be kick-started by Madoff's spectacular crash. Some of the most interesting stories we've seen this morning are these:
continued...Weekend at Bernie's
December 15, 2008 @ 09:23 AM | By Greg MacSweeney
OK, I wasn’t really at Bernie Madoff’s house, and my weekend wasn’t as funny as the 1989 film Weekend at Bernie’s, but everywhere I went this weekend people were talking about Berard Madoff’s alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme. First, a father in my son’s Saturday morning ice hockey class mentioned the alleged fraud to me as we were chatting. Then, later that afternoon as I was sitting on a Polar Express train ride in Phillipsburg, NJ, I heard a couple of adults discussing Bernie Madoff across the aisle. (If the kids were discussing Madoff, I really would have been floored). By the way, the train ride is a lot of fun for the kids — hot chocolate, Santa, elves, music, silver bells, the whole nine.
continued...Shock and Disbelief: Bernard Madoff Accused of Defrauding Clients of $50 Billion
December 12, 2008 @ 12:07 PM | By Greg MacSweeney
Bernard Madoff, the founder of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC and a former Nasdaq Stock Market chairman, was arrested and charged with securities fraud in what has beeen called by federal prosecutors as a Ponzi scheme that could involve losses of more than $50 billion.
continued...OTC v Exchanges: a question of risk and regulations (video)
November 24, 2008 @ 03:04 PM | By Melanie Rodier
Credit default swaps have heightened market anxiety because they are conducted in the over-the-counter market where regulations are few and information about risk is often hidden. Marketplace Senior Editor Paddy Hirsch explains how OTC markets work in this video.
continued...Day Traders React to Market Volatility
November 21, 2008 @ 02:26 PM | By Greg MacSweeney
Who says you can't make money in this market? A number of times over the past few weeks, I've heard people say that the current markets aren't good for investing, but are actually great for trading. In fact, the insane volatility creates a perfect market for active traders. Although many frown on so-called day trading, it is part of the market. In this report from WNYC.org, day traders talk about surviving and even thriving in today's market.
continued...NYSE Harnesses News Filtering Technology to Retain, Attract Issuers
October 30, 2008 @ 02:05 PM | By Penny Crosman
In its latest act of self-reinvention, to compete with and differentiate itself from among the growing throng of electronic exchanges, the New York Stock Exchange yesterday rolled out a new, free market data, news and alerting service for NYSE listed companies called Market Access Center.
continued...(Some) brokerages are finally getting into YouTube (video)
October 29, 2008 @ 05:14 PM | By Melanie Rodier
While entertainment and consumer product companies have been dabbling in social media since at least 2005, financial firms have been slow to react.
But in the last year, retail brokerages in particular and banks have increasingly been using social networking to communicate with clients, according to a new report by marketing and research firm, Corporate Insight.
continued...
Content Analytics for Individual Investors
October 27, 2008 @ 10:52 AM | By Melanie Rodier
As we continue to anxiously follow the wildly fluctuating stock market, YellowBrix, a provider of content analytics, announced the release of RightTrade, a service targeted at individual investors that makes predictions before the market opens each day and tracks the real-time sentiment of any publicly traded company.
continued...Federal and NY State Prosecutors Investigating CDS Trading (NPR.org audio)
October 21, 2008 @ 08:42 AM | By Greg MacSweeney
Prosecutors are looking to see if traders manipulated the prices of credit default swaps in order to weaken confidence in financial companies, according to this report from NPR’s Marketplace Morning Report. Then the traders would short the financial stocks as the prices fell.
continued...Comment on this blog entry
Omgeo’s Lind Talks About Allustra Deal, Lehman (VIDEO)
September 16, 2008 @ 11:58 AM | By Melanie Rodier
At the SIBOS payments conference in Vienna, Greg MacSweeney talks to Omgeo MD Tim Lind about the company’s acquisition of Allustra, as well as the latest events on Wall Street…
continued...
Comment on this blog entry
Optimizer for Online Trading and Other Virtualized Web Apps
September 12, 2008 @ 05:38 PM | By Penny Crosman
If a spike in trading occurs on your site one day, will your online trading application be able to keep up? This is the type of issue behind RadWare’s announcement of VirtualDirector today, a product that aims to improve the performance of virtualized web applications.
continued...Comment on this blog entry
Hard Drives That Can Keep Up With Quants
September 10, 2008 @ 05:53 PM | By Penny Crosman
The heads-down financial wizardry that quants perform – constructing and running pricing models, volatility models, market simulations and such – as well as the reams of data traders look at and the analysis portfolio managers perform, all call for supercomputer-like desktop machines. The round of high-performance solid state drives that Intel announced today looks like a good fit for such Wall Street power users. The drives hold a lot of data (80 gigabytes), are high performing (with read speeds of up to 250MB per second and write speeds up to 70MB per second) and have low latency (85 millionths of a second read latency). They have no moving parts, which should make them less likely to break than mechanical drives (these SSDs boast a mean time between failure of 1.2 million hours) and they consume a mere 150 milliwatts of electricity each (a milliwatt is a thousandth of a watt; a household light bulb consumes 25 to 100 watts).
continued...Comment on this blog entry
OpTier Offers A Clearer View of Transactions
September 09, 2008 @ 02:18 PM | By Penny Crosman
OpTier is shipping a new version of its CoreFirst software this week that the company says will provide better visibility into transactions such as trade orders and new tools to meet service level agreements or promises on trade execution.
continued...Comments(2)
Sectoral Asset Management Finds Leasing an OMS Better Than Buying
August 28, 2008 @ 09:02 AM | By Penny Crosman
Sectoral Asset Management, a Montreal-based investment advisory firm, recently began using the application service provider version of LineData's LongView Trading order management system. Why lease versus buy the software? "We’re a small boutique firm, we have limited IT resources, and we don’t have the resources internally to host or manage trading applications," says Laurent Sicard, IT manager at Sectoral Asset Management.
continued...Comment on this blog entry
Talk to Walt (Bettinger)
July 23, 2008 @ 11:54 AM | By Melanie Rodier
Charles Schwab Corp. named Walter W. Bettinger II as its new CEO, replacing the discount brokerage's founder.
continued...Comment on this blog entry
Fidelity Top Online Brokerage for Customer Satisfaction, says Survey
February 20, 2008 @ 03:44 PM | By Melanie Rodier
Fidelity ranked last year as the top online brokerage in terms of customer satisfaction, according to a new survey carried out by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) and ForeSee Results.
continued...Comment on this blog entry
Soc Gen: Kerviel Messages with Broker Revealed
February 11, 2008 @ 11:54 AM | By Melanie Rodier
With a second trader now in custody in the Soc Gen fraud scandal and rogue trader Jerome Kerviel in jail, a French magazine today published a series of instant messages Kerviel and his broker at Newedge exchanged over the course of several months leading up to their arrest.
continued...Comment on this blog entry
Software Lets Old Apps Run Faster Across Windows Clusters
February 07, 2008 @ 04:39 PM | By Penny Crosman
Ever since the clock speeds of individual computer chips stopped doubling, those who have wanted to run existing applications faster -- such as algorithmic trading desks -- have had to turn to grid computing or specialized hardware to get that extra processing power. Multicore chips (which put two, four or more computer processors on one chip) and clusters of computers hold out the promise of high-performance computing but can't truly provide it to the typical application. The reason for this, as we've noted before, is that most applications have been written in a single-threaded manner -- they're designed to do one thing at a time. For an application to take advantage of more than one processor, whether on a multicore chip or across clusters of computers, it needs to be rewritten so that it's multi-threaded (in other words, it can perform several tasks at the same time) or optimized in some other way.
continued...Comment on this blog entry
First Coverage Adds Quote Feeds to Help Buy-Side Assess Sell Side Trade Ideas
January 29, 2008 @ 02:46 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Toronto-based First Coverage is adding real-time quote feeds from global exchanges to its Web-based software, allowing the buy-side to further quantify the value of trading ideas and other research they are getting from the sell-side.
continued...Comment on this blog entry
Online Options Brokers Should Target Women and Generation Y, Survey Shows
January 25, 2008 @ 11:30 AM | By Ivy Schmerken
Are you curious about the characteristics and behavior of online options traders? This week Chicago-based OptionsHouse, an online retail and institutional brokerage house, rolled out the results of its first annual survey and it found that 91 percent of options traders are men and that 57 percent are between the ages of 45 and 54 years of age. They are also educated —76 percent are college graduates, while 32 percent have graduate degrees.
continued...Comment on this blog entry
Lime Brokerage Acquires Stake in CBOE Stock Exchange
January 09, 2008 @ 02:03 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Lime Brokerage has acquired a minority stake in CBOE Stock Exchange, a subsidiary of the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE). The investment was made on Jan. 3, although financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
continued...Comment on this blog entry
Vhayu Extends Low Latency Trading Platform To Options, Futures
January 07, 2008 @ 01:28 PM | By Penny Crosman
"As the need for low latency and the ability to accommodate increasing message volumes migrates to other asset classes beyond equities, how do you deal with that?" asks Sang Lee, managing partner of Aite Group, in explaining the significance of Vhayu's announcement today that it's adding new data feed handlers to its Velocity streaming tick processing software.
continued...Comment on this blog entry
Global Trading Technology Spend Reached $45.8 billion in 2007
December 20, 2007 @ 04:50 PM | By Melanie Rodier
Global spend on trading and related technology and services reached an estimated USD$45.8 billion in 2007, according to a new report from Somerset, UK-based Kimsey Consulting.
continued...
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Remote Desktops Coming to Wall Street in 2008
December 18, 2007 @ 04:53 PM | By Penny Crosman
Here's a prediction for the coming year: remote desktopping -- in other words, moving desktop CPUs off (or out from under) desks and into racks, data centers and closets -- will hit the Street in force some time in 2008, or maybe 2009. Wachovia has already said they're kitting out the new trading floor in their under-construction Charlotte headquarters with remote desktops (or "back-racked PCs" as they call them), which will open in 2009, and the inventors of the latest generation of remote desktop technology, Teradici, say that 20 Wall Street firms have expressed interest in it.
continued...Comments(3)
StreamBase Rolls Out Reuters-Centric Complex Event Processing
November 15, 2007 @ 10:16 AM | By Penny Crosman
StreamBase is announcing today that it's built a Reuters Market Data System-centric edition of its StreamBase Studio complex event processing software. StreamBase Studio itself is both an Eclipse-based graphical development environment and a CEP runtime engine that connects to all the major data feeds and can analyze those data streams in real time. Developers at about 50 Wall Street firms already use StreamBase Studio to build applications that rely on market data streams, such as automated trading, best execution and market data analytics.
continued...Comment on this blog entry
IBM Upgrades Direct, Low-Latency Delivery of Exchange Data
November 14, 2007 @ 12:04 PM | By Penny Crosman
In their ongoing quest to reduce data latency in the delivery of market data to algorithmic trading programs, Wall Street firms are starting to take data feeds directly from the exchanges, cutting out middlemen like Reuters, Thomson and Bloomberg. IBM's recently-released WebSphere Front Office for Financial Markets 2.0 is one of the few products (Wombat offers another) that can accommodate this. "Customers have told us they're interested in having a platform that can handle data that isn't necessarily tied to a data provider, says Larry Baldauf, director of financial services strategy for IBM's software group. "We can connect to different exchanges and data sources and distribute the data to applications."
continued...Comment on this blog entry
Banks to Consolidate 144A Trading on Nasdaq Platform
November 13, 2007 @ 11:03 AM | By Ivy Schmerken
A group of investment banks has decided to stop developing their own electronic trading platforms for 144A securities and instead share the single platform launched by the Nasdaq Stock Market. Yesterday the banks announced their intention to form The Portal Alliance, an industry standard facility designed to serve the market for 144A equity securities – referred to as private placements.
continued...Comments(1)
Colombia Stock Exchange Builds A Scalable SOA Platform
November 01, 2007 @ 11:15 AM | By Penny Crosman
Although its climate is hotter, its industries more diverse and its market smaller, in some respects the Colombia Stock Exchange looks like any U.S. or European exchange. It grapples with the same technology issues -- such as how to get data latency below a few milliseconds and how to build an IT infrastructure that can easily scale and withstand market volatility and surges - that plague any exchange or firm with a large trading floor.
continued...Comment on this blog entry
Vhayu Offers Real-Time and Historical Order Book Analysis
October 29, 2007 @ 10:49 AM | By Penny Crosman
As order books get bigger – the Tabb Group recently estimated that in just equities and options, the volume of market data messages across the global exchanges will soar from under four billion messages per day in 2006 to nearly 130 billion per day by 2010, as the number and variety of trading venues increases, as trades become smaller (e.g. 100 shares per order), as cancels and replacements accelerate, and as Reg NMS and MiFID make it necessary for firms to prove best execution, the need for an engine that can process and store that order book data efficiently becomes greater.
continued...Comments(1)
NYSE Euronext and Partners to Create Electronic Block Trading Market for European Stocks
October 24, 2007 @ 03:12 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
NYSE Euronext has partnered with two European investment banks BNP Paribas and HSBC to develop an electronic block-trading platform for large orders in Pan European stocks in a move that positions the exchange to operate a dark pool under the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID).
continued...Comments(1)
BREAKING NEWS: Thomson Plans to Spin Off TradeWeb
October 10, 2007 @ 02:45 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Thomson Financial announced today that nine of Wall Street's leading bond dealers are investing about $180 million to purchase a minority stake in TradeWeb, the electronic trading platform for fixed-income securities and derivatives. TradeWeb will continue to be owned by Thomson and the consortium of broker dealers. The goal of the strategic partnership is to drive TradeWeb's expanson into multi-asset class trading and to create more of a unified platform with integrated processing for the trading of fixed-income, equities and derviatives, according to the release.
continued...Comment on this blog entry
SIBOS 2007 Snippet: BT and Low Latency
October 01, 2007 @ 03:56 PM | By Greg MacSweeney
When you pick up a phone, you usually don't think about how the call gets from your handset to the person on the other end. But as trading requires lower and lower latency, many traders have started to think about how their orders and messages get from point A to B.
Many associate BT with just telephones in Britain, but the London-based company has almost equal in size in the U.S., according to Chris Pickles, manager of industry relations for BT Radianz. BT has 4,500 financial services clients in the US, another 4,500 in Europe and a couple of thousand in Asia, he reports. And, globally, BT handles 100 million messages per second.
continued...Comment on this blog entry
CAPIS Shifts OMS to Fidessa Trading Platform
September 24, 2007 @ 12:13 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Capital Institutional Services (CAPIS), the global agency brokerage firm based in Dallas, said it’s moving to the Fidessa trading platform as a replacement for its proprietary order management system. “Technology wise it’s probably the most important decision we made in our 30-year old firm,” says Jim Morrow, COO at CAPIS in an interview on Friday.
continued...Comment on this blog entry
FX Bridge Taps FIX Flyer for High Speed Integration
September 18, 2007 @ 11:18 AM | By Ivy Schmerken
As the adoption of the FIX fuels electronic trading in foreign exchange and expands into new areas such as FX options, banks are demanding integration with back office and risk management technology. Today, FX Bridge Technologies, an Atlanta-based developer of FX trading and dealing systems, announced that it’s partnering with New York-based FIX Flyer to integrate the FIX messaging standard into its solution.
continued...Comment on this blog entry
Where Oh Where Has The Order Flow Gone?
September 12, 2007 @ 03:48 PM | By Greg MacSweeney
At Advanced Trading's Peer-to-Peer Multiasset Class Trading Executive Roundtable yesterday, a couple of roundtable delegates wondered where all of the order flow and liquidity has gone and pondered whether the markets will be able to withstand a truly volatile trading day with extremely high trading volumes.
continued...Comments(1)
Audentes Technology Deploys Orc Liquidator
September 12, 2007 @ 12:32 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
As black box trading takes off, Audentes Technology LLC, a small Chicago-based proprietary trading firm, has deployed Orc Liquidator from Orc Software as its derivatives algorithmic trading platform. Audentes declined to comment, but in a statement, Libby Christy, operations manager for Audentes Technology, said the firm was impressed by Orc Liquidator's fast time-to-market, low latency, and connectivity to a large number of markets."
continued...Comment on this blog entry
Wall St. Opens It's Arms to Electronic 144A Marketplaces
August 15, 2007 @ 08:21 PM | By Cory Levine
This week has seen a flurry of activity in the development of electronic platforms for trading equity offerings by private companies that fall under a href=" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_144A" target="_blank">Rule 144A of the U.S. Securities Act. The rule allows for the private resale of securities between institutional investors, which gives private companies a means for raising capital without listing publicly.
Nasdaq announced the availability of an extension to its Web-based PORTAL platform that allows for displaying and accessing liquidity in 144A issuances. Additionally, heavy-hitters Citi, Lehman Brothers, Merril Lynch, Morgan Stanley and The Bank of New York Mellon revealed their plans to create OPUS-5, a competing platform for 144A listings. And to round out the competition, Bear Stearns got in on the act this week, launching its 144A platform, Best Markets, in the U.S.
continued...Comment on this blog entry
Goldman Sachs to Buy Stake In DirectEdge ECN
August 13, 2007 @ 04:02 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Goldman Sachs Group agreed to purchase a minority equity stake in DirectEdge ECN, its parent Knight Capital Group announced today. Goldman will join Citadel Derivatives Group LLC, an affiliate of Citadel Investment Group, LLC, which purchased a minority equity interest in DirectEdge ECN in a transaction that closed on July 23, 2007.
continued...Comment on this blog entry
Lime Brokerage Serves Up Low Latency Data to Brokers
August 01, 2007 @ 11:18 AM | By Ivy Schmerken
Lime Brokerage, a direct-access agency broker located in the Tribeca section of New York City, recently began offering a service bureau model providing low-latency market data to other brokers dealers, according to George Hessler, EVP at Lime who heads sales and strategy. As one of the leading low-latency agency brokers, it does a lot of work with high frequency hedge funds. In fact, Lime’s founder and director, Mark Gorton and its CEO and co-founder Alistair Brown, co-founded hedge fund manager Tower Research Capital, specializing in quantitative trading and investment strategies.
continued...Comment on this blog entry
NYSE Euronext Develops Dark Pool for Crossing Portfolios
July 24, 2007 @ 06:20 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
With dark pools gaining traction among institutions seeking leak-proof matches, one of the world’s largest liquidity pools is venturing into the crossing network space. By the end of this summer, NYSE Euronext is expected to launch NYSE MatchPoint – a point-in-time benchmark crossing-network geared to large index funds and mutual funds looking to matching portfolios of stocks.
continued...Comment on this blog entry
BIDS Trading Exceeds 20 Million Shares in Block Volume
July 18, 2007 @ 01:38 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Dark pools give us something to talk about when they release volume figures. On Monday, BIDS Trading L.P., an alternative trading system (ATS) focusing on U.S. block equity trading, announced it had executed more than 20 million shares in daily volume twice last week. BIDS Trading operates BIDS ATS, an anonymous trading system launched in the spring of 2007 by a consortium of major brokers. Even though the nascent block-crossing venue has plenty of competitors in the ATS space including Liquidnet, ITG POSIT, NYFIX Millennium and Pipeline Trading, BIDS appears to be building momentum right out of the gate because of the liquidity pools and customer bases of its strategic partners.
continued...Comment on this blog entry
On Point Executions Launches Options Smart Order Router
July 16, 2007 @ 03:15 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
With liquidity and quote traffic escalating across the options exchanges, On Point Executions —an agency-only broker dealer — has launched a smart-order routing solution today called STING that can sweep all six equity options exchanges simultaneously to extract 100 percent of the displayed liquidity. The options broker caters to the sell side has been beta testing the smart-order router and sweeping technology since January with several broker-dealer clients and market makers.
continued...Comment on this blog entry
XBRL – Breaking Into the Equity Analysis Bastion
July 09, 2007 @ 12:02 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
By Raghuvir Mukherji
Senior Consultant, Financial Securities
Domain Competency Group
Infosys Technologies Ltd.
Raghuvir_mukherji@infosys.com
After giving traders and order routers a bad scare in the form of algorithmic trading, technology is now in a position to threaten equity analysts, or make their job simpler, depending on where one is in the equity analysis ‘value chain’. The advent of the internet and the use of XML (eXtensible Mark Up Language) enabled the quick transmission of information across the globe between people and machines using different software systems.
continued...Comment on this blog entry
Citi's Acquisition of ATD Intersects with Private Equity
June 27, 2007 @ 11:33 AM | By Ivy Schmerken
It’s no accident that Citigroup (Citi) is close to acquiring Automated Trading Desk, a computerized market-making firm for $700 million, as reported by the Wall Street Journal Online yesterday and Reuters this morning. Both financial services companies have connections to the private equity world where relationships are cultivated and exit strategies are born.
In January of this year, ATD received a $60 million investment from private equity firm Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) based in Palo, Alto, Calif. Back in April of 2002, Lava Trading secured a $30 million financing led by Boston-based TA Associates. TA eventually exited the investment in Lava by selling Lava to Citigroup in 2004. “TA Associates was the primary equity firm that invested in Lava Trading before it was sold to Citibank and Lava was almost entirely a technology play,” said Peter Kent, CFO of ATD said in an interview with Wall Street & Technology last month. [See "Private Equity Gold Rush," July 2007]
continued...Comment on this blog entry
Towergroup Coverage: Let's Meet for Dinner on the Floor of the NYSE
May 31, 2007 @ 01:39 PM | By Greg MacSweeney
It was only four short years ago when Robert Hegarty, the managing director for Towergroup's Securities & Investments practice, made the statement that the NYSE trading floor will never go away. How quickly things change. In his presentation today at this year's Towergroup Financial Services and Business Technology conference, Hegarty joked, "Oops, I'm eating crow on that one, but soon we will all be eating crow in a very nice restaurant on the floor of the exchange" after the exchange eventually closes all of the trading floors. Hegarty highlighted some of the notable staffing cutbacks that many of the broker dealers and specialists have made in the past few months as they continue to reduce their floor presence on the NYSE.
Comment on this blog entryCreditex Acquires Stake in Trade Settlement Inc.
May 16, 2007 @ 04:32 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Eyeing the market for loan-only credit default swaps, Creditex Group has acquired a minority stake in Trade Settlement Inc. (TSI), a privately held company that operates a post-trade processing platform for syndicated bank loans.
As part of the transaction, both companies are also announcing a partnership between TSI and T-Zero, an independently managed subsidiary of Creditex Group, which operates a post-trade affirmation platform for credit default swaps. The partnership will enable T-Zero, a technology agnostic firm, to expand its affirmation platform into the syndicated loan market.
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NASD Issues Guidance for Reg NMS Trade Reporting
May 15, 2007 @ 04:33 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
As brokers prepare to comply with the Pilot Stocks Phase of Regulation NMS scheduled for July 9th, the NASD issued guidance last week clarifying how member firms should report their trades to the tape. The notice provides guidance on how to use the NASD’s new transaction reporting modifiers when brokers are reporting trades that are exceptions or exemptions to Rule 611 of Reg NMS to NASD facilities.
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Bear Stearns Sounds the Death Knell for Its Specialists
May 14, 2007 @ 08:38 PM | By Cory Levine
The next domino toppled today for floor-based specialists, as Bear Stearns announced it will write down the value of its specialist business, Bear Wagner, by $225 million. Firms all along Wall Street have been re-evaluating their specialist staff as the New York Stock Exchange has implemented its Hybrid market and shuttered one of its trading floors. Other firms to have slashed specialist numbers include UBS, Bank of America, Credit Suisse and Van der Moolen.
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SEC Regs Too Much? Try Trading in 103 Foreign Countries
May 10, 2007 @ 11:10 AM | By Melanie Rodier
With full implementation of Reg NMS just around the corner and MIFID looming in Europe, broker dealers on both sides of the Atlantic are busy navigating new regulations. But what are the regulatory implications for a broker dealer who executes deals with countries around the world?
New York-based securities firm Auerbach Grayson provides trade and post-execution services in 103 countries, representing more than 250 equity and equity derivatives exchanges across the world's developed, emerging and frontier industries, from France to Uganda and North Korea to Bangladesh.
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SIFMA Market Structure Report: Brokers Wait for Clarifications on Block Trades as July 9 Reg NMS Implementation Approaches
May 08, 2007 @ 05:49 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Broker dealers are waiting for regulators to clarify certain issues in advance of the July 9 Reg NMS implementation date, according to a panel at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) Market Structure conference last Friday.
The majority of the unresolved issues are around the block trade exemptions, when to time the trade and print to the tape and sweep and what to do with the residual that is left over, said Christopher Concannon, EVP Transaction Services at a href=http://www.nasdaq.com target="_blank">The Nasdaq Stock Market. There are also questions about self-help procedures as well as certain order types such as intermarket sweep orders or ISOs.
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ISE CEO Krell Announces Retirement
April 05, 2007 @ 09:10 PM | By Cory Levine
International Stock Exchange boss and industry luminary David Krell announced his retirement this week, effective at the end of the year. While he will vacate the role of CEO, the exchange's Board intends to elect him as Chairman. He will be succeeded by current COO Gary Katz.
Katz and Krell have enjoyed 21 years working together, and co-founded ISE ten years ago.
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Virtual Stock Exchange Opens in Second Life
March 16, 2007 @ 05:49 PM | By Penny Crosman
After we wrote about Saxo Bank’s opening an office in the virtual world Second Life, 24-year-old Australian entrepreneur Luke Connell contacted us to tell us about the securities exchange he opened recently in Second Life called World Stock Exchange. This simulated stock exchange opened on March 5 and trading volume has exceeded $23 million in virtual dollars (approximately $90,000 U.S. dollars). Connell, whose Second Life alter ego is called LukeConnell Vandeverre, explained how and why his investment firm, Hope Capital, and others are doing business on the computer animated Second Life site, and how people can make or lose real money by investing in a simulated stock exchange.
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Symons Reaps Benefits of Market Downturn
March 02, 2007 @ 03:27 PM | By Kerry Massaro
Many firms were affected by the market downturn on Tuesday, Feb. 27 — some negatively and some positively. Symons Capital Management was able to turn the chaos into an opportunity by dipping into its cash reserves and getting good prices as the market was going down.
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Swapstream to Expand Electronic Trading Into Short-Term Interest Rate Swaps
January 31, 2007 @ 04:25 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Swapstream, the London-based multilateral electronic trading platform for interest rate swaps (IRS), will expand its marketplace in mid-February with the launch of Eonia (Euro Overnight Index Average) swaps trading facility.
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Aqua Hires Fishkind to Drive Global Sales for New ATS
January 31, 2007 @ 04:18 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Aqua — a new alternative trading system (ATS) owned byeSpeed Inc. and Cantor Fitzgerald focused on offering block liquidity to institutions, hedge funds and brokers — announced the hiring of Andrew Fishkind as global head of sales.
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Instinet and FlexTrade Launch Portfolio Trading Optimizers
January 25, 2007 @ 12:01 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Portfolio trading seems to be gaining momentum on the buy side. This week, Instinet and FlexTrade Systems both announced portfolio-trading optimization tools that come up with best trading schedule for a portfolio of stocks.
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BOX Files to Cut Fees in Penny Pilot; AFA Adds Options Trading
January 24, 2007 @ 01:38 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
The Boston Options Exchange said it filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to reduce fees in preparation for the Penny Pilot Program in which options will trade in one-penny increments.
The proposed change will reduce the trading from the standard $0.20 to $0.15 per contract.
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GL Trade Connects to Instinet’s Chi-X for Pan-European Equity Trading
January 24, 2007 @ 12:59 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
GL Trade, the Paris–based supplier of front-to back-office trading systems, is offering connectivity to Chi-X, one of the first Pan-European alternative trading systems (ATSs) to arise in response to the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID), which goes into effect in November of 2007. Under MiFID, an ATS like Chi-X will be known as a multilateral trading facility or MTF.
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Cinnober Rocks the BOAT
January 22, 2007 @ 02:59 PM | By Cory Levine
Industry consortium BOAT selected trading technology provider Cinnober Financial Technology as the underpinnings of its market data platform. The consortium of global investment banks also announced that Markit Group Ltd. will partner with BOAT to manage business operations.
BOAT was launched in September 2006 to provide a reporting facility for pre- and post-trade data that will be distributed to banks in order to help meet the requirements of EU regulation MiFID. The database of trade data will be accessible by both the buy side and sell side.
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NYSE Fines Seven Specialists
January 17, 2007 @ 12:39 PM | By Cory Levine
NYSE Regulation yesterday announced censures and fines for seven member specialist firms, to the tune $2.8 million total. The fines are the result of multiple trading violations that occurred between 2003 and 2006.
The firms were fined for breaking the firm quote rule, under which NYSE specialists are required to execute orders presented to them at prices that are at least as favorable as the NYSE's published bid or offer. The specialists firms also failed to honor commitments to buy or sell coming from the Intermarket Trading System. Other violations included failure to maintain written supervisory procedures, failure to display eligible limit orders and improperly executed short sales.
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GL Trade Acquires FNX Solutions
January 17, 2007 @ 09:45 AM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
With over-the-counter products showing faster growth than exchange-listed instruments, Paris-based GL Trade is acquiring FX Solutions, a provider of front-to-back-office products used by capital markets firms and hedge funds to manage and process OTC products. The deal will be closed in February of 2007, according to Monday’s release. FNX will enhance TRADIX, GL Trade’s existing capital markets offering, which generates sales of a little over 4.5 million euros. FNX expects revenues of 11 million euros in 2006, most of which is recurrent, and expects revenue growth of 25 percent over the next two years, said the release.
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James Leman Joins Westwater Corp.
January 11, 2007 @ 01:12 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
James Leman, an industry veteran who brings 20-plus years of expertise in electronic trading as well as middle and back-office technology strategies, has joined Westwater Corp. as managing director and head of its Capital Markets Practice.
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OptionsHouse Goes Lives with Online Trading Site
January 10, 2007 @ 04:58 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
OptionsHouse, a new discount brokerage firm launched its online Web site on Monday offering stock and options trading at a simple, flat-fee rate to retail investors and institutions.
Targeting savvy traders, the start-up is a spin-off of PEAK6 Investments LP, a Chicago-based equity option market maker based which leased space on the Chicago Board of Trade’s original 1930 trading floor.
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Creditex Spins Off Q-WIXX Execution Service for Large Credit Derivatives Portfolios
December 20, 2006 @ 04:44 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
Creditex Group is spinning off a new electronic platform, Q-WIXX Inc., for trading large credit derivatives portfolio. The automated execution service conducted its first beta trade for a portfolio valued at $1 billion (500 million euros) consisting of 131 North American and European credit derivatives names.
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OTC Derivatives Update: DTCC Partners With CLS; T-Zero Integrates With GEM’s FpML Mediator
December 14, 2006 @ 01:37 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
Automation of the OTC derivatives market continues to be a priority for the industry.
The Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. (DTCC) announced its selection of CLS Bank International (CLS) to provide central settlement of payments for over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives contracts housed in DTCC’s DerivSERV Trade Information Warehouse.
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Reuters Releases News Products to Drive Automated Trading
December 14, 2006 @ 11:38 AM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
Reuters announced two products this week that allow customers to incorporate news into automated trading strategies. Both products fall under Reuters complete suite of offerings for automated trading and form part of its Core Plus strategy.
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NYSE Group Will Buy Messaging Expert TransactTools
December 14, 2006 @ 10:50 AM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
NYSE Group signed a definitive agreement to acquire TransactTools Inc., a leader in providing enterprise-messaging solutions for the securities trading industry. The transaction is expected to close in early January 2007, though financial terms were not disclosed.
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Equity Exchanges Launch Reg NMS-Compliant Systems
December 07, 2006 @ 01:06 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
In case you had any doubt that stock exchanges would get their electronic trading systems up and running in time for the Regulation NMS deadline, this week three U.S. equity exchanges — Boston, Chicago and NYSE — made significant progress toward reaching that goal.
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ICE to Open E-Trading Facility in NYMEX's Neighborhood
December 07, 2006 @ 01:00 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
Intercontinental Exchange, the Atlanta-based electronic energy marketplace, has licensed office space in lower Manhattan’s World Financial Center, signaling a desire to expand its presence in the same complex where its main rival, The New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX), is located. The new offices will serve as a state-of-the-art electronic trading center providing access to ICE’s electronic markets as well as host training and marketing activities.
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Creative Destruction in Real-Time Data Feeds (Guest Blog Entry)
December 05, 2006 @ 05:31 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ken Barnes, Wombat Financial Software
Perhaps you’re a member of a high frequency equities trading operation looking to fuel your strategy formulation and execution applications with the highest quality data available. To this end you may have spent considerable time sourcing and cleaning historical databases, eliminating the noise of bad prints and anomalies in the tails.
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Instinet Prepares to Launch Canadian ATS
December 04, 2006 @ 06:02 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
Ramping up its efforts to develop alternative execution venues outside the United States, Instinet plans to launch an alternative trading system (ATS) in Canada, called ICX (Instinet Canada Cross).
The ATS will operate as a continuous, electronic auction market for trading Canadian exchange-listed securities, according to the release. ICX is expected to launch in 2007 and will be operated by Instinet I-X Limited, a soon-to-be registered Canadian investment dealer, pending regulatory approval.
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Creditex Completes Merger With CreditTrade
November 28, 2006 @ 02:52 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
Creditex completed its merger with CreditTrade, underscoring plans to create a global leader in voice, hybrid and electronic execution in the credit derivatives market. The transaction, announced on July 25, has received both NASD and FSA approvals, according to Tuesday’s release.
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Tradeware Expands DMA to Mexican Stock Exchange
November 28, 2006 @ 02:45 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
Tradeware Global Corp. has established an agreement with Interacciones Casa de Bolsa, among the largest Mexican brokers, to provide electronic direct market access (DMA) to the Mexican Stock Exchange through FIX connectivity.
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The BOX Files to Participate in Penny Pricing Pilot
November 28, 2006 @ 02:40 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
The Boston Options Exchange (BOX) has filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to participate in the penny pilot program for option trading, which will begin on Jan. 26, 2007. In addition, BOX has also filed a quote mitigation plan to help manage market data traffic, according to the announcement.
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ISE Stock Exchange to Launch Displayed Stock Market
November 28, 2006 @ 02:32 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
The ISE Stock Exchange will unveil its fully displayed stock market on Friday, Dec. 8, according to an announcement by the publicly traded International Securities Exchange (ISE), which also operates the leading all-electronic U.S. options exchange.
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Penson to Purchase Schonfeld’s Clearing Business
November 22, 2006 @ 10:43 AM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
Penson Worldwide agreed to acquire the clearing business of privately held Schonfeld Securities, LLC, a New York-based securities firm, which has been a pioneer in active trading.
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Penson to Purchase Clearing Biz of Schonfeld Securities
November 22, 2006 @ 10:43 AM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
Penson Worldwide agreed to acquire the clearing business of privately held Schonfeld Securities, LLC, a New York-based securities firm, which has been a pioneer in active trading.
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NeoNet Eyes Asian Expansion and New Hires
November 21, 2006 @ 05:38 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
Direct market access broker NeoNet Securities plans to offer connectivity to Asian markets next year and will expand its staff at its Jersey City, New Jersey headquarters.
The expansion of its exchange connectivity will start during the first half of next year, with the Tokyo Stock Exchange in Japan, according to Greg Treacy, director of sales at the firm. NeoNet expects to add four to five new positions at the Jersey City office, including technologists, traders and sales people to support the firm’s growth, says Treacy.
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SEC Exemption Expands NYSE Bonds' Universe
November 17, 2006 @ 06:07 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
Days after announcing partnerships with Kestrel Technologies and Townsend Analytics (TAL) to provide access into NYSE Bonds, its new electronic fixed-income trading marketplace, NYSE Group received regulatory approval to vastly expands the number of debt securities it can trade through the revamped electronic fixed-income marketplace.
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Kestral and TAL to Provide Access to NYSE Bonds
November 16, 2006 @ 01:50 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
NYSE Group selected Kestrel Technologies and Townsend Analytics to provide market participants with access to NYSE Bonds, its redesigned electronic bond-trading platform that will trade corporate bonds issued by companies listed on the exchange.
The exchange is currently developing the all-electronic bond system to run on the NYSE Arca matching engine. In preparing for the launch in early 2007, it’s choosing multiple front-end platforms to provide the issuers, traders and investors with connectivity into the bond marketplace, pending SEC approval.
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Korean Exchange Taps Progress Apama for Algo Trading
November 16, 2006 @ 11:46 AM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
Algorithmic trading is soon coming to Korea. The Korean financial software IT vendor Koscom has picked the Progress Apama Algorithmic Trading Platform to facilitate algorithmic trading on the Korea Exchange (KRX). In addition, Progress and Koscom have entered into a strategy partnership whereby Koscom will develop a localized version of the Apama platform for distribution in Asia.
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RBC Capital Markets Picks Wombat Messaging Software
November 15, 2006 @ 05:29 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
RBC Capital Markets’ proprietary trading desk has signed up for Wombat Financial Software’s market data platform to achieve low-latency market data distribution and integration.
RBC will deploy Wombat’s MAMA platform above TIBCO/Rendezvous (RV) messaging software, according to the release.
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Fidessa Expands Buy-Side EMS into Asia
November 09, 2006 @ 04:00 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
Eyeing the global market for institutional trading, Royalblue’sFidessa launched an execution management system (EMS) workstation for buy-side trading desks in Asia.
The EMS is a global, broker-neutral, multi-asset execution platform for buy-side trading desks in Asia, according to Wednesday's release.
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NYSE Group Cuts 520 Positions
November 09, 2006 @ 12:03 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
NYSE Group will reduce its workforce by 520 positions as part of an organizational downsizing aimed at cutting costs and improving efficiencies, it announced on Wednesday.
The staff cuts impact approximately 400 employees and 120 full-time consultants from its New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), NYSE Arca and Securities Automation Corporation (SIAC) business units.
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eSpeed Sees Court Decision as Win in TT Patent Case
November 08, 2006 @ 02:04 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
On Monday, eSpeed said that a recent court decision over the scope of Trading Technologies International’s (TT) patent infringement claims favors eSpeed and its Ecco subsidiary, and enables them to offer a variety of user interfaces to conduct futures transactions.
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Fidelity Launches ATS
November 06, 2006 @ 04:45 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
Fidelity Capital Market Services, a unit of Fidelity Brokerage Company, has launched CrossStream, an alternative trading system (ATS) that anonymously matches brokerage clients’ buy- and sell-side orders against the diverse order flow of the agency brokerage house. The new ATS will not publish bids and offers before client’s orders hit the Street, according to yesterday’s announcement.
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Amex Selects Lava for Outbound Routing
November 02, 2006 @ 12:46 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
The American Stock Exchange (Amex) has selected Lava Trading to provide private linkage services for sending outbound orders to other market centers publishing protected quotes in compliance with the Securities and Exchange Commission's Regulation NMS.
The linkage service will be rolled out with the Amex’s new Auction and Electronic Market Integration (AEMI) platform, the exchange said.
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Nomura to Acquire Instinet
November 02, 2006 @ 12:36 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
Nomura Holdings, the Japanese financial services conglomerate, has agreed to acquire Instinet Inc., the global agency broker, in an all cash transaction, according to today’s announcement. The purchase price was not disclosed.
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Lek Securities Battles NASD Over OATS Regulation
October 25, 2006 @ 06:04 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
Lek Securities is taking the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) to court to counter charges that the broker-dealer did not submit trade information required for compliance with the Order Audit Trail System (OATS). The trial was scheduled to begin today.
Lek is challenging the NASD charges on the basis that OATS is illegal and improperly structured, according to a release issued by the institutional direct-access broker-dealer.
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Interactive Brokers Offers Penny Priced Options
October 25, 2006 @ 05:46 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Interactive Brokers, the online broker located in Greenwich, Conn., began offering penny pricing in options today. IB cut the minimum price difference for U.S. listed options from a nickel to a penny.
The broker is jumping the gun ahead of the rest of the U.S. options industry, but not for long. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) mandated a penny pilot program beginning on Jan. 27, 2007, the release noted. The six U.S.-based options exchanges will have to reduce the minimum price change from five cents to one cent for options listed on 13 underlying stocks.
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Instinet and Credit Suisse to Access Each Other’s Dark Pools
October 25, 2006 @ 09:59 AM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
Instinet and Credit Suisse’s Advanced Execution Services (AES) unit have agreed to provide their clients with access to each other’s dark liquidity pools, according to today’s announcement. The partnership between the two brokers involves Credit Suisse’s CrossFinder and Instinet’s CBX and is intended to increase institutions’ chances of executing large trades with minimal market impact.
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Aleri Labs Attacks Throughput Claims With Low Latency
October 23, 2006 @ 01:40 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
Aleri Labs., a provider of event stream processing technology for the financial services industry, claims it has broken the sub-millisecond latency barrier for event stream data processing.
The new performance standard is available through Aleri Streaming Platform, a high-performance application development platform that financial firms can use to analyze market data, process trades, monitor compliance and manage risk in real time.
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Mayor Bloomberg Says His Company Is Not for Sale
October 19, 2006 @ 11:23 AM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been approached by potential buyers of Bloomberg L.P., the multibillion-dollar financial information, market data, analytics and media company he created, but he has decided not to sell the company at this time, according to a release.
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CME and CBOT to Merge Derivatives Exchanges
October 18, 2006 @ 06:59 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
The Chicago Exchange Mercantile and Chicago Board of Trade have signed a definitive agreement to merge the two exchanges, creating a powerhouse in global derivatives trading that rivals the size of its nearest competitors.
Chicago Mercantile Exchange Holdings plans to purchase CBOT Holdings Inc., operator of its cross-town rival, the Chicago Board of Trade, for $8 billion.
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NYSE Explores Joint Trade Reporting Facility with NASD
October 17, 2006 @ 01:22 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
NYSE Group has entered into discussions with the NASD to create a trade reporting facility (TRF), serving customers reporting off-exchange trades in all listed NMS (National Market System) stocks.
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BATS Trading Warns of Spikes in Market Data Messages
October 17, 2006 @ 12:04 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
BATS Trading, operator of BATS (Better Alternative Trading System) ECN, warned participants that receive the BATS PITCH market data that it expects message activity levels to increase — partly due to systems changes related to Reg NMS — and customers may want to increase their bandwidth.
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BeX Taps Citigroup's Richardson as President
October 11, 2006 @ 05:19 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
Gearing up for the evolving equity market structure, The Boston Equities Exchange (BeX) — an electronic stock market owned by the Boston Stock Exchange and five securities firms — announced that C. Thomas Richardson was named its new president, assuming the role as of Nov.6
Richardson joins BeX, a joint venture, electronic equity exchange owned by the Boston Stock Exchange and five equity partners — Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Fidelity Brokerage Company, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch.
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TradingScreen Recruits Bloomberg’s European Head of FX Sales
October 11, 2006 @ 05:15 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
In a move to offer FX trading on its multi-asset, global trading platform, TradingScreen has hired Jonathan Cooper, former head of FX sales and liquidity at Bloomberg. Cooper is now global head of FX Sales at TradingScreen, which also launched secondary FX trading functionality.
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Cormack Departs NYSE Group; Brown Exits SIAC
October 11, 2006 @ 12:42 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street and Technology
NYSE Group announced that Mike Cormack, who joined NYSE Group following the acquisition of Archipelago in January of this year, is stepping down from his current position and will become a senior consultant to the company in early 2007.
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Instinet Unleashes Wizard, Data-Intensive Arrival Price Algorithm
October 10, 2006 @ 05:26 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
In the fast and furious race to roll out innovative algorithms, Instinet, the global agency broker, launched Wizard, a new twist on the arrival price algorithm.
The system was configured to create a trading schedule for each stock in a portfolio by factoring in the historical volatility of stock and options prices. Arrival price — the price at the time an order arrives in the market — becomes the benchmark for the trader.
What makes the model powerful is that it’s based on actual trading history — prices and volatility — and the average daily volumes, says Mike Plunkett, president, North America, Instinet.
Instinet developed Wizard, which was released to buy-side clients on Monday, over a 14-month period in partnership with Northfield Information Services, the Boston-based developer of analytical risk models for investment professionals.
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Commission Recapture Kicks Into Overdrive
October 05, 2006 @ 09:51 AM | By Tim Clark
By Tim Clark and Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
In the October issue of Wall Street & Technology, we explored the practice of commission recapture in the article “A Hard Act to Follow.” The catalyst for that story was derived from an insightful roundtable discussion that BNY Securities Group subsidiary Lynch, Jones & Ryan hosted with a handful of other commission recapture players. The general consensus from that meeting and in follow-up discussions indicated that commission recapture, while still a viable means to generate returns, would one day become obsolete, especially since players such as UBS and Goldman Sachs shuttered their commission recapture operations, deeming it an industry in decline.
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HG Trading Deploys Progress Apama for Algo Trading
October 04, 2006 @ 04:35 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
U.S. hedge fund HG Trading has implemented the Progress Apama Algorithmic Trading Platform for equity trading from Progress Software Corp. The boutique trading firm located in Heartland, Wisc., which specializes in high-velocity, low-risk strategies, plans to extend its uses into other asset classes, including futures and options, according to the release.
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NYFIX Partners With Paladyne Systems
October 04, 2006 @ 04:05 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
NYFIX signed an agreement with Paladyne Systems LLC. to provide FISX connectivity to the hedge fund industry through its “Powered by NYFIX” hosted solutions platform. Paladyne provides a hosted front-to-back-office technology suite to the hedge fund industry.
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NYSE Conducts Test for Hybrid Market Phase III Launch
October 03, 2006 @ 04:36 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
By Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
On Saturday, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) conducted a market-wide training exercise involving floor brokers, specialists and other market participants to prepare for the Phase II launch of the NYSE Hybrid Market.
On Oct. 6, Phase III full Hybrid Market trading will begin with two NYSE-listed securities, followed by a gradual roll out of all NYSE-listed securities through December 2006, the NYSE release said.
The simulated Hybrid Market trading session in NYSE-listed stocks produced valuable information and experience for exchange, its members and member firms prior to the Phase III launch, the release said.
CME to Offer Customers Colocated Electronic Trading
October 03, 2006 @ 04:31 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
By Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
CME will begin offering collocation services for customers' firms that execute electronic trades on CME Globex in the fourth quarter of 2006.
For the first time, CME will offer customers the opportunity to connect their collocated trading servers to the CME over high-speed fiber optic connections. These redundant server connections are expected to decrease network latency times for order entry to CME Globex to less than one millisecond. The new network connection option is called CME Local Network (CME LNET).
The CME selected Equinix Inc., a leading provider of network-neutral data centers and Internet exchange services, and Digital Realty Trust Inc., a leading owner and manager of corporate data centers and Internet gateways, to enable customers to connect to CME Globex through high-speed, high-availability fiber links.
Comment on this blog entryATS Epidemic
September 28, 2006 @ 03:00 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
I was surprised to learn that the sell-side community is funding yet another round of ATSs after investing in regional exchanges and turning their own internalization engines into SEC-registered crossing networks.
In case you haven’t heard, this week Wall Street firms unveiled plans to launch two different electronic matching initiatives — begging the question, do we need another ATS?
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CME Revamps Market Data Packages and Pricing
September 28, 2006 @ 01:26 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
CME is revamping the future exchange’s market data packages. Starting on Jan. 1, 2007, all distribution of CME market data will be repackaged to include market-depth-data, according to the exchange’s release.
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Bank of America Pilots its First FX Algorithm
September 28, 2006 @ 12:46 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
Bank of America launched a pilot of its first foreign exchange (FX) algorithmic trading strategy, and also expanded liquidity access to third party platforms. Clients can access liquidity through multi-bank platforms such as TradingScreen, FXall, 360T and most recently, Integral Development Corp.’s FX Inside.
The bank made the announcement on Monday disclosing several enhancements to its growing range of Electronic Trading Services for foreign exchange clients.
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Hayes Leaves Charles River to Head Client Services at Pipeline
September 20, 2006 @ 05:24 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Pipeline Trading Systems LLC, operator of the Pipeline block electronic trading marketplace, announced that Michael Hayes, formerly with buy-side order management systems provider Charles River Development in Boston, joined the company as VP and executive director of client services.
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Lava Offers Derivatives Trading for the Buy-Side
September 20, 2006 @ 04:56 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
By Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
Lava Trading is offering derivatives trading to its buy-side customers through its multi-broker LavaX platform.
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Lehman Brothers Buys Stake in BATS ECN
September 20, 2006 @ 04:31 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
By Ivy Schmerken
Lehman Brothers has acquired a minority stake in BATS Trading, operator of the Kansas City-headquartered BATS ECN, the investment bank announced on Tuesday. Financials of the transaction were not disclosed.
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NYSE Group Invests in Marco Polo Network
September 19, 2006 @ 05:00 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
By Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
Looking at fast growth in less developed markets, NYSE Group has acquired an equity stake in Marco Polo Network Inc.(MPN), an electronic platform providing connectivity and order routing to equities and derivatives listed on emerging market exchanges. Details of the transaction were not disclosed.
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