ELECTRONIC TRADING

Brokerage America, a Nasdaq market maker, will begin to attach liquidity fees to specific Nasdaq securities submitted by its broker/dealer clients to compensate the firm for ECN trade-execution fees that have had a significant cost on doing business.

Specifically, broker/dealer clients will not be charged for every not-held order of 2,500 shares or greater, the company states. The firm will charge a penny a share for every held order and not-held order of 2,00 shares or less.

With a not-held order "the customer is putting their faith in the market maker to get the best price as possible," explains James Dyer, head of trading at Brokerage America. "With a held order, the market maker is going out to execute the order against the Street. He is required to (do that) the minute he gets the order, whether it's in the customer's interest or not," Dyer explains. Pink Sheets and Bulletin Board stocks are excluded from the fees.

Swapstream-- a neutral trading platform for swap and OTC derivatives and broker community--selected Xlaunch, a subsidiary of Deutsche Borse Group (DBG)to serve as its primary supplier of managed technology and network services. Under terms of the agreement, the Swapstream trading application will be hosted in DBG's high-performance data center in Frankfurt.

In addition, a secure telecommunications network will be built and operated to connect Swapstream's customers with the platform, and a technical help-desk will be set up for all Swapstream participants. Expected to launch in Q2 of 2003, Swapstream is neutral, electronic, real-time marketplace and trading alternative for the interest-rate derivatives market serving banks and brokers, states the release. Xlaunch is part of DBG's e-market factory whose mission is to create and support new electronic marketplaces in financial and non-financial areas.

The New York Board of Trade's Electronic Order Routing (EOR) system has been deployed in all five of its soft commodities. To date, the EOR system has logged over 19,000 orders placed with over 7,000 orders filled since March 2002.

In addition, Rolfe & Nolan Systems--a supplier of automated order-entry and order management systems to the futures industry-- recently finished testing the EOR system and is in the process of connecting the EOR system to their RANorder client FCMs (futures commission merchants). Telephone-based orders can be entered into the routing system from EOR-capable floor booths using a 15-inch touch screen monitor connected to a networked personal computer.

London-based Solution Forge has developed a trading connection between the Orbis Group, a global manager of offshore mutual funds, and Credit Suisse First Boston's (CSFB) Advanced Execution Services (AES) using the Financial Information Exchange (FIX) protocol version 4.2 Orbis has historically used the vendor's FIX.NET Server 2002, based on Microsoft technology, to communicate transaction data to third parties electronically. However, in this case, additional fields had to be added within the FIX messages that contain instructions to the AES system, to activate one of CSFB's seven value-added trading strategies, states the vendor.