Electronic Trading Newsflashes

Thomson to acquire TradeWeb for $515 million in cash and contingent payments.

The Thomson Corporation will acquire TradeWeb, the leading online global trading platform for fixed-income securities, for $385 million in cash. In addition, Thomson will pay contingent payments of up to approximately $150 million over the next three years based on the achievement of growth targets. The transaction is expected to close later this quarter.

TradeWeb is owned by a consortium of eight leading investment banks, namely: Credit Suisse First Boston, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank. The Internet-based technology provides market data as well as rapid price discovery in which institutional buy-side fixed-income customers can simultaneously trade with multiple dealers.

Thomson Financial plans to integrate TradeWeb's real-time trading platform with its Thomson ONE Yield, a broad suite of pre-trade analytical capabilities. Thomson says it will be able to offer dealers and buy-side traders an electronic trading solution from pre-trade analytics to post-trade confirmation.

According to 2004 first-quarter volume figures released by TradeWeb today, growing adoption of TradeWeb's straight-through-processing functionality by both dealers and buy-side customers resulted in a 41 percent increase in allocated trade-ticket volume in the first quarter over the same quarter last year.

U.S. institutional investors traded a record $5.4 trillion on the platform, up 42 percent from the same period a year ago. Of the 10 fixed-income products traded on the platform, mortgage-backed securities (TBA-MBS), which soared 65 percent from last year to reach $1.7 trillion, was the highest percentage increase. Mortgages and U.S. Treasury and agency trading (which totaled $1.9 trillion and rose 47 percent since the first quarter of 2003) each represent a third of TradeWeb's total volume.

Upon closing of the transaction, Jim Toffey will continue to lead TradeWeb and assume responsibility for all fixed-income solutions. Toffey will report directly to Sharon Rowlands, president and chief operating officer of Thomson Financial. Lee Olesky, cofounder and president of TradeWeb, will continue as stay president and continue to drive the trading platform's international expansion.

Linedata creates LongView ASP for smaller firms.

Linedata Services launched LongView ASP, an application-service provider-based order-management system aimed at smaller firms with limited IT resources. The multi-asset class ASP provides all of the sophisticated features and capabilities of the traditional LongView Trading OMS with the low-maintenance benefits of an ASP, the company says.

Among the benefits are the ability to seamlessly receive new product features and enhancements and access to new interfaces as liquidity providers across multiple asset classes are added.

LongView ASP was rolled out in late 2003 in the U.K., followed by the U.S. rollout to Lincoln Equity Management earlier this year.

"Until now, smaller firms haven't been able to maintain a full-featured OMS," states Jack Wiener, chief operating officer, Linedata Services in the release. In addition, many larger firms are also outsourcing IT and administrative functions, he notes. Linedata can continue to provide them with the necessary support even in the absence of dedicated internal resources, he says.

SunGard/BRASS taps James Leman as president.

James Leman was named president of SunGard Trading Systems/BRASS. Leman takes over for Tom King, president since 1999, but who will remain a senior executive at SunGard Trading Systems Group. Both Leman and King report to Ron Lang, group executive.

Leman, who has 31 years of experience in the securities industry, has been a driving force in automating trading and electronic connectivity, and is one of the founders of the Financial Information Exchange (FIX) protocol. For the past 12 years, Leman served as managing director of global-equity customer electronic trading at Citigroup. Previously, he was manager and vice president of equity trade support Salomon Brothers. Leman also worked in supervisory roles at the New York Stock Exchange.

ITG acquires direct-access player Radical Corp.

Investment Technology Group (ITG) has completed its acquisition of Radical Corporation, a provider of direct-access trading solutions to the institutional brokerage and hedge fund community. In June 2003, ITG acquired a 25 percent stake in Radical when it entered into an exclusive licensing agreement for the Radical system.

Radical is a high-performance, Windows-based trading-system that provides instant access to all major market destinations, including the New York Stock Exchange's Designated Order Turnaround (or DOT) System, electronic communications networks, ITG's Posit matching service, ITG's family of algorithmic servers and ITG's broker-routing network.

Radical's advanced smart-routing technology automatically routes orders to listed and over-the-counter liquidity pools according to sophisticated predefined trading-strategies aimed at achieving price improvement and capturing liquidity across all destinations, according to ITG.

ITG also established a Canadian joint venture with IRESS Market Technology Ltd., which operates Australia's leading equities market-data execution systems. The broker-neutral platform includes order routing and trade-execution capabilities and is used by the majority of professional market participants in Australia and New Zealand, according to ITG.

Under terms of the agreement, IRESS is purchasing a 50 percent stake in KTG Technologies Corp. (an ITG subsidiary and a leading Canadian provider of direct-access and equity-trading services) for $4.1 million (CD $5.5 million). The new joint venture plans to bring the IRESS product to the Canadian market in early 2005.

NYFIX acquires network and opens data centers as part of European expansion.

NYFIX will acquire the remaining 60 percent of Eurolink Network, in which the company previously had a 40 percent interest. NYFIX will pay for the purchase with one-year promissory notes aggregating $500,000, payable in either cash or NYFIX common stock.

Also in connection with its international expansion plans, NYFIX incorporated NYFIX International LTD., a wholly owned subsidiary in the U.K., which is applying for membership in the Financial Services Authority. In addition, the company opened two new European data centers in London and Amsterdam, which went into production this week. Through the new data centers, NYFIX will offer a more cost-effective global order-routing capability to its institutional buy side and brokerage customers, the company says.

NYFIX says it added $2 million in annualized revenue during the first quarter of 2004 primarily through sales of its NYFIX Platinum, which is the combined exchange-listed and Nasdaq trading platform incorporating the Renaissance Market Maker workstation. The company says it has six clients using the NYFIX Platinum and has signed an additional six.