Securities Industry News articles from August 2007

Securities Industry News archives from August 2007

The Volatility Effect: As Traders Weigh Options, NYSE Holds Its Own~New venues also showed staying power during July volume spikes.
August 6, 2007... When the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) tumbled 416 points on Feb. 27, the New York Stock Exchange, where most of the Dow's components are listed, saw its share of the listed market--not counting activity on the NYSE Arca electronic...

American Exchange Drops Hammer on Reg SHO Violators.
August 6, 2007... In a sign that regulators are toughening enforcement of new short-selling rules, the American Stock Exchange (Amex) last week announced significant disciplinary actions against two small broker-dealers for improperly using market-maker...

TSE Seeks to Polish Image With New Technology and Alliances~A-list exchanges eager to cooperate; derivatives platform delayed.
August 6, 2007... The Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) has been a hard-luck poster child in recent years, dealing with embarrassing system crashes, capacity problems and staff dismissals. At a time when its peers, from the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on down, are...

Newly Merged SRO Points Toward Principles.
August 6, 2007... Already in its early days, new self-regulatory organization (SRO) Finra--the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority--is taking U.S. broker-dealer oversight in a new direction. Its approach is to focus increasingly on outcomes rather than...

Pace Quickens for the Fast Protocol ~Exchanges take the lead after early round of enhancements.(FIX Protocol Ltd.)
August 6, 2007... Fast, an adaptation of the FIX protocol for high-speed delivery of market data, started slowly in 2005. Version 1.0 wasn't ready for prime time, according to industry participants who met at a recent working group conference of FIX Protocol...

Hong Kong Eases Fund Manager Licensing~Moves to boost competitiveness without sacrificing protections.
August 6, 2007... Securities regulators have taken steps to bring Hong Kong more in line with international standards by lowering licensing requirements for fund managers and planning to require quarterly, rather than biannual, earnings reports from...

Error in Singapore Forced Unwinding of 110,000 Trades.
August 6, 2007... The Singapore Exchange (SGX) recently faced the same operational risk consequences as the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) and others in having deal with the aftermath of a miskeyed order. According to a statement by SGX, a trader at DMG &...

Option Spread Price Break.(Brief article)
August 6, 2007... Chicago-based online brokerage options-Xpress said Aug. 1 that it will reduce commissions on multi-leg strategies, or spreads, as much as 75 percent by treating up to four legs of a transaction as a single trade. Commissions for these trades...

Gains From Margining.(services of Interactive Brokers L.L.C. and OptionsXpress)
August 6, 2007... Two firms that are offering portfolio margining accounts directly to individual investors, Greenwich, Conn.-based Interactive Brokers and optionsXpress, have opened 1,078 and 500, respectively. The Interactive Brokers accounts had $862 million...

Morningstar Index Futures.
August 6, 2007... U.S. Futures Exchange (USFE) in Chicago said it will offer the first exchange-listed, cash-settled futures contracts based on fund research firm Morningstar's equity style indexes beginning Sept. 28. Nine contracts, based on the indexes in...

Townsend Mexico Link.
August 6, 2007... Accelerating its drive into Latin America, Lehman Brothers multi-asset, multibroker trading systems subsidiary Townsend Analytics said that Bulltick Capital Markets is using its RealTick technology to connect to Mexico's Bolsa Mexicana de...

People In The News.(Penson Financial Services and Nyfix Millennium Aernative Tading System)
August 6, 2007... The co-heads of sell-side transaction sales at the Nyfix Millennium alternative trading system have joined Penson Financial Services, the broker-dealer and clearing subsidiary of Dallas-based Penson Worldwide, as SVPs of sales and marketing....

Broker-Dealer AML Compliance Enters New Phase.(laws, regulations and rules of Securities and Exchange Commission against anti-money-laundering )
August 6, 2007... Recent high-profile regulatory actions taken against broker-dealers by various regulatory and self-regulatory organizations (SROs) for failing to comply with anti-money-laundering (AML) rules and regulations appear to bring a new message: The...

Planning for 10b5-1 Plans.
August 6, 2007... On Oct. 23, 2000, the Securities and Exchange Commission made effective Rule 10b5-1(c) under Regulation Fair Disclosure (FD), providing officers, directors and affiliates of public companies, or insiders, significant new flexibility and...

CFTC v. Amaranth: A Case of Market Manipulation?
August 6, 2007... On July 25 and 26, respectively, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) filed legal actions against Amaranth Advisors, a hedge fund that collapsed last September, alleging intentional...

Ranking Relationships.
August 6, 2007... Randy Cass started First Coverage with the communications needs of both buy- and sell-side firms in mind. The year-old software company offers a Web-based application that streamlines interaction, improves workflow and increases transparency...

Tabb Analyst Johnson Named President of 3D Markets.(3D Marketing Group)
August 6, 2007... Upstart alternative trading system (ATS) developer 3D Markets is bulking up with the appointment of Tabb Group analyst Jeromee Johnson as president, effective Aug. 1. Johnson, who has also worked for high-tech agency brokerage UNX, will lead...

TradingScreen Says It's MiFID Ready'.
August 6, 2007... As the European trading and exchange community prepares for the Nov. 1 effective date of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID), multibroker trading platform developer TradingScreen says it is ready with MiFID in a Box, a...

Scottrade Adds Security to Its Brokerage Package~McAfee and VeriSign systems accompanied by education program.
August 6, 2007... Online brokerage Scottrade is taking a series of steps to address customer concerns about data security and, it hopes, bolster its competitive position through trust and confidence. The St. Louis-based firm is not the first to put a...

GigaSpaces, Microsoft Team for High-Speed Processing~Collaboration addresses trading and analytic demands for speed and throughput.
August 6, 2007... GigaSpaces Technology and Microsoft Corp. have announced a combination of Microsoft's server version of Excel, Microsoft clustering, and user-defined functions (UDF) with GigaSpaces' Processing Grid for collocating application logic with data...

Technology Veteran Moss Is President of Avistar~Former Mantas chief to help lead unified communications initiative.
August 6, 2007... Video-collaboration technology provider Avistar Communications Corp. has named Simon Moss, former CEO of anti-money-laundering systems company Mantas, as president. Moss, who spent four years in the top job at Mantas, which last year was...

Event Processing Goes Beyond Algorithms.
August 20, 2007... In the financial services industry, complex event processing (CEP)--technology that can monitor, analyze and find correlations among seemingly unrelated events, and then react in milliseconds--has primarily been used in algorithmic trading,...

Exchanges for Climate Change~Chicago market leads the way in emissions trading; truly global solutions remain elusive.(Company overview)
August 20, 2007... If there is a market solution to the problem of global warming, then it stands to reason that Chicago might be the place to hit upon it. The city where physicist Enrico Fermi engineered the first controlled nuclear chain reaction in 1942, and...

U-5 Process Could Compound Job Problems.
August 20, 2007... While investors may be worried about losing money in the current volatile market, securities industry professionals have a self-interest at stake: their jobs. In what could be a leading indicator, Bear Stearns Companies said Thursday that it is...

In Options, Will Nasdaq Be the Lucky Seventh?
August 20, 2007... Consolidation and economies of scale are orders of the day for securities markets around the world, but the fast-growing U.S. options market is about to see the entry of its seventh exchange: the Nasdaq Options Market. An official start date...

Volatility a Boon To New Wave of Dark Liquidity Pools.
August 20, 2007... Trading volumes have been surging in recent weeks across market centers including some of the newer dark books, which appear poised to ramp up further with an influx of institutional investors. Paradoxically, in light of these platforms'...

New Execs for StreamBase ...
August 20, 2007... StreamBase Systems, a leader in the high-performance complex event processing technology that has supported growth in algorithmic trading (see front page), said last week that Barry Morris, its CEO since 2004, is leaving to create a technology...

... and OptionsXpress.(Brief article)
August 20, 2007... Online brokerage optionsXpress, which was founded in 2000 and went public in 2005, has its first chief marketing officer (CMO), as of last week. The company recruited Paul E. Eppen, who was most recently SVP and CMO at education company DeVry,...

BondDesk at Record Levels.(Brief article)
August 20, 2007... The boom in trading volumes across asset classes and electronic platforms of various kinds has extended to retail fixed-income marketplace BondDesk Group. It said that its BondDesk Trading system executed 1.17 million transactions in the second...

People In The News.
August 20, 2007... BSG Alliance Corp., a technology and strategy consulting firm that specializes in Enterprise 2.0 system implementations, has rounded out its financial services group's senior management team with two experienced Wall Street hands. David Lustig,...

The Wealth-Transfer Torch Is (Not) Passed.
August 20, 2007... In the decades ahead, as a result of mortality and inheritance, an estimated $20 trillion will be passed to a new generation. Yet big disappointments lie ahead for financial firms that believe they will benefit from this multigenerational...

How Demographics Differ.
August 20, 2007... Nations are not aging at the same rates. These differences affect the financial management trends in each country. In the U.S., according to United Nations population figures, the median age is about 10 percent higher than in much of Asia. Many...

DTCC Cuts Timetable for Customer Account Transfers~Starting in October, Acats process set to be accelerated by two days.(Depository Trust & Clearing Corp.)
August 20, 2007... New York-based Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. (DTCC), pending approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission, on Oct. 22 will reduce the time it takes to transfer customer accounts from one brokerage firm or bank to five business days...

Source Technologies Lets Brokerages Print Checks Remotely.
August 20, 2007... When account holders have needed a distribution from a mutual fund, it has historically meant that checks had to be sent from a brokerage firm's headquarters or issued at a branch office. But Source Technologies, a Charlotte, N.C.-based...

Automation Brings Speed and Maturity to FX Trading~Institutional presence, algo trading, CLS Bank help transform the asset class.
August 20, 2007... With increasing levels of automation and the influx of buy-side participants, the foreign exchange asset class is taking on characteristics of other financial instruments that were automated earlier. Prime brokers, algorithmic trading and the...

RIAs Need Technology to Support Growth Aims: Aite.(Registered investment advisers)
August 20, 2007... Registered investment advisers (RIAs) have enjoyed annual asset growth of 10 percent since the last market downturn of 2001, according to a report by research firm Aite Group. But the advisers' growth expectations are now higher than that, and...

Deja Vu in the Securities Finance Back Office~Yet another asset class calls for the STP treatment--and just in time.
August 20, 2007... An explosion in global volume of securities on loan is prompting borrowers and lenders to automate not only the negotiation of their deals, but also post-trade processing that encompasses a range of middle- and back- office functions. Some...

Icap's Zimmerhansl: Transparency Is Key to Efficiency~Interdealer brokerage seeks to differentiate itself with electronic trading.(Company overview)
August 20, 2007... Once an arcane back-office activity, securities lending is quickly becoming a major front-office function as brokerages, custodian banks and underlying lenders realize the extent of the profit opportunity. However, the rapid growth of the...

Auction Model Gains Among Beneficial Owners~ESecLending grows as the securities lending industry shifts into higher gear.
August 20, 2007... In what is one of the last areas of pricing opacity in the financial industry, eSec-Lending anticipates significant growth in the volume of securities it lends to borrowers this year. The Boston-based firm's increasing share of the securities...

Linedata OMS Links to Goldman's EMS.
August 20, 2007... In a partnership that blurs the boundaries between order management systems (OMSs) and execution management systems (EMSs), Linedata Services said it is synchronizing the trade blotter of its LongView Trading software with Goldman Sachs'...