Trading Newsflashes: Bloomberg TradeBook Offers Access to CME Eurodollar Options

Bloomberg TradeBook Offers Access to CME Eurodollar Options

Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) announced that trading of CME Eurodollar options strategies is available to users of the Bloomberg Tradebook service, a global electronic agency brokerage for futures equities and options.

"Bloomberg Tradebook creates an important distribution opportunity for us, as it provides market participants around the world access to our electronic options market," stated Robin Ross, managing director, CME Interest Rate Products in the release.

Last month, CME introduced several technology enhancements to improve liquidity, transparency and price discovery for clients, Ross noted in the release. "We are excited that Bloomberg users will be able to take advantage of enhanced functionality for trading CME Eurodollar options," she stated.

According to Kim Bang, President and CEO of Bloomberg Tradebook L.L.C., who is quoted in the released, "Combined with the robust news, data and analytics functionality of the Bloomberg Professional service, Bloomberg Tradebook offers traders the unparalleled advantage of a fully integrated electronic execution platform."

Options on CME Eurodollar futures are the most actively traded, exchange-listed, interest rate options in the world, according to the release. In 2005, a total of seven million CME Eurodollar options traded electronically compared to two million contracts in 2004, representing a gain of 234 percent. For the first two months of 2006, CME Eurodollar options electronic volume on CME Globex soared to 1.9 million options, an increase of 383 percent over the January-to- February 2005 period. Options on Eurodollar futures are a risk management tool that provide the ability to limit losses while maintaining the possibility of profiting from favorable changes in futures prices, the release states.

Griswold Goes Live With Lava ColorPalette

The Griswold Company, an independent agency brokerage firm operating on the NYSE floor, deployed Lava Trading's Color Palette as its trading and order management system. Griswold, which also offers an agency OTC desk, chose Lava after a lengthy evaluation of OMS providers, the release states. ColorPalette has been deployed on the company's OTC desk and will also be used on their NYSE floor operation.

"We believe ColorPalette is the superior choice among OMS systems and offers all the features we value, including SmartRouter technology, full depth-of-book, a customizable graphic user interface and longer on-line data retention," stated Robert McCooey, Jr., President and CEO of The Griswold Company, in the release. In today's trading, monitoring and compliance driven environment, Lava offers the best OMS at the most reasonable cost," added McCooey in the release.

ColorPalette is a sector-based trading and OMS solution and is designed as a fully automated, high-throughput system for managing institutional and retail customer orders.

Among its features are regulatory handling of current rules for all capacity orders, customer order crossing and internalization management. It has an open architecture with APIs. Complete trade risk management and offers TraderIntelligence, an order-based query.

Norwest Venture Partners Invests $12.5 Million in HedgeStreet

Norwest Venture Partners, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, invested $12.5 million into HedgeStreet Inc., the first government-regulated online exchange for binary options and futures. HedgeStreet will use the funds to bring new innovative products to market, increase liquidity, and accelerate customer acquisition by promoting the exchange to retail and institutional investors as well as hedge funds. This is HedgeStreet's third round of financing bringing the total amount of capital raised to date to $24.9 million.

Recently, HedgeStreet and Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) announced a strategic alliance for the development of new products, technology sharing, distribution marketing and other initiatives. CBOE also made an investment in HedgeStreet, according to the release.

"HedgeStreet has the opportunity to become a major player in the multi-trillion dollar derivatives market, and the company's strategic alliance with CBOE will play a key role in helping HedgeStreet realize its full potential," states Jim Lussier, venture partner at NVP and HedgeStreet board member.

An all-electronic marketplace, subject to regulatory oversight by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), HedgeStreet allows individuals to buy and sell inexpensive, innovative financial contracts called Hedgelets, which are based on the outcomes of economic events and price movements in commodities, currencies, real estate and economic indicators.

Eze Castle Software Integrates With Code:Red to Rank Research

Eze Castle Software (ESC) has integrated its product suite with Code:Red's research management system (RMS), enabling the ranking of research and analysts. The integration allows clients to send data from ECS's Traders Console to Code:Red's Red Alerts RMS. Then clients of ECS's Commission Optimizer commission budget and management software—can also integrate Red Alerts' broker research rankings into their online voting module. ESC's Tradewinds data hub manages both parts of the integration.

The integration with ECS's Traders Console OMS enables Red Alerts to receive position, trade and security master data from the OMS, accounting system or prime broker through ECS's Tradewinds ASP data hub. Red Alerts processes this data and correlates it with the corresponding research items. This integration keeps portfolio managers, analysts and the marketing team informed about their positions and enables them to tie back the research that influenced their decisions for the position.

The integration also lets clients to embed RedAlerts' broker research rankings into their online voting module, facilitating the ranking of research and analysts. This eases the compliance burden on investment professionals, while adding value to the research process, said the release.

Red Alerts provides users with position alerts, integrated real-time news and event feeds, and the ability to aggregate, store, qualify and search research. "Portfolio managers and analysts need to work with current positions and accurate security data to ensure their decisions and calculations for trades are based off the same data the traders are working with," stated Tim Gavin, CEO of Code:Red, in the release. "Having an audit trail of the trade data and the research that the trade was based on is a key component of Red Alerts," Gavin stated in the release. "Clients can quickly search for the research associated with the trade to analyze their decision to buy or sell a security," Gavin further stated in the release. "And the ability to send Red Alerts research rankings to Eze's online broker voting tool completes the research and commission circle," he added.