Securities Industry News articles from February 2006

Securities Industry News archives from February 2006

Getting a Grip on Class Actions.
February 6, 2006... As the stakes--and settlement amounts--in securities class-action lawsuits climb, investment advisers and some of the financial intermediaries that service them are looking more closely for solutions to the inefficiencies in retrieving...

Benign Start For Reg NMS: Subpenny Rule.(National Market System)
February 6, 2006... The Securities and Exchange Commission's subpenny rule went into effect last week, and investors are the better for it. That's the broad consensus among market observers, confirming earlier indications that this is the least controversial of...

STP Bid in Corporate Actions.(straight-through processing)
February 6, 2006... Market data giant Reuters Group, in its latest bid to boost its DataScope Pricing & Reference Data back-office offering, has made a deal to deliver its corporate actions data feed via the XSP data-scrubbing system of Xcitek. The move, enabling...

ISITC Addresses Standards For Fund-Valuation Messaging.(International Securities Association for Institutional Trade Communication)
February 6, 2006... Breaking new ground as a promoter of standardization, the International Securities Association for Institutional Trade Communication (ISITC) has begun work on standards for messages used to distribute mutual fund net asset values (NAV). The...

Registration of Hedge Funds: Headaches Just Beginning.
February 6, 2006... The Feb. 2 deadline for hedge funds to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission has come and gone, and the early returns indicate that many advisers are still sitting on the fence while others take advantage of a loophole that...

Novation Innovation.
February 6, 2006... The International Swaps & Derivatives Association (ISDA) novation protocol, introduced last September as part of an industrywide effort to accelerate and streamline confirmations of privately negotiated derivatives transactions, entered its...

People in the News.(Joseph A. South joins Shadow Financial Services Corp)(Carlos Hernandez joins MarketAxess)(Brief Article)
February 6, 2006... Shadow Financial Services Corp., a technology vendor to the likes of Archipelago, Raymond James & Associates and National Financial Services, has lured Joseph A. South away from a hedge fund to be its new president. Formerly EVP of Paloma...

Patently Important.
February 6, 2006... Patents have become a big-stakes concern for the financial industry, but it's not just due to fears that legions of Wall Streeters might have to do without their BlackBerrys. A few weeks ago the BlackBerry supplier, Canada's Research in ...

Coming to the Aid of EBay.
February 6, 2006... EBay last July filed for a writ of certiorari to have its case against patent-holder Merc-Exchange heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. MercExchange won lower-court judgments that eBay had infringed on its patents, including one pertaining to the...

Making STP a Buy-Side Reality.(straight-through processing)
February 6, 2006... In the U.S., sell-side, custody, exchange and settlement institutions have made remarkable improvements in operational efficiency since the 1970s. Their investment in straight-through processing (STP) has enabled our current...

Buy Side, Credit Derivatives Are Top Risk Challenges.
February 6, 2006... The buy side is playing catch-up to the sell side in risk management, while processing credit derivatives is the biggest challenge for the sell side, according to research firm Financial Insights. The Framingham, Mass. organization's report...

TradingScreen Product Spans the Buy-Side Life Cycle.
February 6, 2006... TradingScreen, a provider of multi-broker, multiproduct trading platforms with an emphasis on straight-through processing (STP), on Feb. 1 launched TradeEMS, described as the first fully integrated execution management solution that supports...

Advent Adds Osborne to Its Portfolio Exchange.
February 6, 2006... Osborne Partners Capital Management of San Francisco has gone live on the Advent Portfolio Exchange (APX), a new offering from portfolio management systems leader Advent Software that enables buy-side firms to manage their investment operations...

Depositories Advance Preparations for Euro Global Debt.
February 6, 2006... Securities issuers and market participants are facing a June 30 deadline for legal and operational changes mandated by the European Central Bank (ECB) in issuing and processing euro-denominated global debt. Although the alterations are not...

Trading Technologies Stresses Speed, Connectivity.
February 6, 2006... With the boom in derivatives trading showing no sign of letting up, Trading Technologies International (TT) got off to a busy start in the new year. On the first business day of 2006 it released X-Trader 7, the latest generation of its trading...

Fox's Departure for BofA Adds to FinCEN's Challenges.
February 6, 2006... William J. Fox, director of the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) since December 2003, is the latest in a series of high-ranking government officials involved in anti-money-laundering (AML) efforts to jump to...

New MiFID Draft Eases The Pressure In Some Provisions.(Financial Instruments Directive)
February 13, 2006... Concerns about the costs and tight deadlines for complying with the European Union's Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) didn't entirely dissipate last week when the European Commission issued its long-awaited level-two draft of...

The Technology of Research Is Still Under Development.(Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein internet services)
February 13, 2006... Investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW) said last fall that more than 80 percent of its clients considered e-mail the most important channel for receiving research reports, yet they complained about the mountainous volumes that...

Connecticut's Blumenthal Spells Out Plan For Hedge Fund Panel.
February 13, 2006... Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal expects to announce by month's end the members of a hedge fund task force that will look into conflicts of interest, disclosure requirements, enforcement and other regulatory concerns. The task...

Twist and Identrus Team Up on Identity Fraud.(Twist payments standardization group alliance with Identrus L.L.C.)
February 13, 2006... The Twist payments standardization group is teaming up with bank-owned Internet authenticity vendor Identrus to work on technical solutions to the identity fraud problem. The initiative, to be led by a working group of the two...

A Retail Bond First.(Banc of America Securities L.L.C. alliance with Incapital L.L.C.)
February 13, 2006... Incapital, the Chicago-based electronic platform for bond distribution, is teaming up with Banc of America Securities today as lead managers of a $1.5 billion issue of Mexico notes into the U.S. retail market. In the form of InterNotes, a...

DTCC's Derivatives Brain Trust.(Gina Ghent joins Depository Trust & Clearing Corp)(Brief Article)
February 13, 2006... Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. (DTCC) last week announced the appointment of derivatives lawyer Gina Ghent as vice president for business development. The depository's role and business in post-trade derivatives processing have been...

People News.(Tarek El-Sadany joins Iris Financial Solutions )(Frank Petrilli joins Nexxar Group)(Brief Article)
February 13, 2006... Front- and middle-office software company Iris Financial Solutions has hired an Oracle Corp. executive, Tarek El-Sadany, as chief technology officer and SVP of development, based in San Francisco. The latter title, newly created, reflects...

Learning From the Elders.(in stock market)
February 13, 2006... Moscow's stock exchange, the Russian Trading System (RTS), made a rookie mistake last week. It made access to its trading software available over the Internet so that outside developers could work on an upgrade, but the testing platform wasn't...

The Panoply of Risk.(risk management)
February 13, 2006... All of the Federal Reserve Board governors are attuned to risk management issues; it's part of their territory, and besides, the Basel II capital accords will more closely tie bank capital levels to risk in all its forms. Fed member Susan...

Long Bond Is Back; When-Issued Screens Lit Up.(e-bond distribution)
February 13, 2006... Interdealer brokerages reported no operational or technological issues around the U.S. Treasury's auction last Thursday of 30-year bonds, the first new issuance in this long-dated benchmark maturity since 2001. Cantor Fitzgerald's e-bond...

Savvis Maps Out Turnaround Despite Lingering Uncertainties.
February 13, 2006... Although Savvis reported a net loss of $69.1 million for 2005, Jack Finlayson, the St. Louis-based company's acting CEO, expects the financial picture to improve this year. The remote computer services supplier to the securities and other...

Nymex Revises Its 10 Percent Sale.(with General Atlantic )(Brief Article)
February 13, 2006... The New York Mercantile Exchange said it revised the terms of its agreement to sell private equity firm General Atlantic (GA) a 10 percent equity stake. In addition to paying $160 million for that stake, GA will invest an additional $10 million...

DTCC Gears Up for Hedge Funds: Utility says alternative investments market is ripe for extension of its fund services.(Depository Trust and Clearing Corp)
February 13, 2006... The Depository Trust and Clearing Corp., seeking to leverage its strengths in mutual fund processing, is planning to operate a similar platform focused on single hedge funds, funds of funds and commodity pools. Pending sufficient volume...

Lava Upgrades OMS, Other Sell-Side Products.
February 13, 2006... Citigroup-owned trading systems innovator Lava Trading last week released a new version of its ColorPalette trading and order management system (OMS) offering several advanced features and enhancements to more fully support the complete trading...

Real-Time Events In Store From Progress, GemStone.(real time database usage in algorithmic trading)
February 13, 2006... Progress Software Corp.'s Apama algorithmic trading business has launched Progress Apama EventStore, a real-time database and replay facility that enables back-testing of algorithmic trading strategies on historical data. The EventStore,...

Tullett Prebon Is First Money Broker in China.
February 13, 2006... Tullett Prebon, the interdealer brokerage unit of U.K.-based Collins Stewart Tullett, has become the first money broker in China by opening a joint venture with Shanghai International Trust & Investment Corp. (Sitico). Although the business has...

TNS Partners With TSX Unit.(Transaction Network Services form partnership with TSX Datalinx)
February 13, 2006... Transaction Network Services has formed a partnership with TSX Datalinx, the market data operation of TSX Group, parent company of the Toronto Stock Exchange. TNS will serve as one of TSX's managed network providers, delivering Toronto Stock...

Buy-Side Trading: The New Paradigm.(Company Profile)
February 13, 2006... The world of buy-side trading has been evolving for years. But with regulatory pressures mounting and a number of electronic trading platforms growing in size and sophistication, the pace of change is picking up and buy-side traders are poised...

For Liquidnet, 2006 Is Year Of H2O.
February 13, 2006... There's nothing subtle about the name that Liquidnet has given its next-generation marketplace for institutional block trades: H2O. Shares have been pouring into the peer-to-peer trading network that order management systems (OMS) pioneer Seth...

Fixed Income Goes in the ECN Direction.(electronic communications networks)
February 13, 2006... It took longer than electronic trading of equities, but for buy-side traders, fixed income is not only moving in that same direction--it has fully arrived. The major electronic fixed-income platforms have been reporting steady and significant...

Clearer Is Bullish on Electronic Trading: Penson Worldwide has extended its deft acquisition skills into the electronic execution arena.
February 13, 2006... Electronic trading's biggest benefit to institutional investors is the anonymity it provides, and this allows them to execute large orders by breaking them up into hundreds or even thousands of pieces to execute anonymously across multiple...

Window on the Buy Side I: Indata.(Interview)
February 13, 2006... In most aspects of trading and technology, the buy side has a history of watching and waiting. Sell-side firms were far more aggressive in information technology investments, which served asset managers well as long as they were content to rely...

Window on the Buy Side II: OMS Supplier Perspectives.(order management systems)
February 13, 2006... It's more than 20 years since Seth Merrin, a Wall Street trader who went on to found software company Merrin Financial (and who now runs Liquidnet--article on page 17), introduced the first of the order management systems (OMS) that today are...

The Road to Portfolio System Integration.(portfolio management survey)
February 13, 2006... In June last year, Celent, the Boston-based research firm, published a survey, "Trading and the Portfolio System Suite," on trends in portfolio management systems and related components down to trade order management systems (OMS) at the...

New Trade Idea Dissemination System Launched.(youDevise introduced Trade Idea Monitor for financial markets)
February 13, 2006... In October, youDevise, a London company specializing in on-demand technology applications for financial markets, introduced Trade Idea Monitor (TIM), a Web-based system that lets brokerages disseminate trading ideas to buy-side and money...

Donaldson Holds His Ground: Ex-SEC chief defends agency, track record.(Mutual Fund Directors Forum)(Securities and Exchange Commission)(William H. Donaldson)
February 20, 2006... William H. Donaldson says he has no regrets about the sweeping reforms that he pushed through during his 2003-2005 tenure as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. That includes a tightening of mutual fund governance regulations,...

Cantor's Wager on Gambling.
February 20, 2006... Back in the 1980s, when markets moved on tips and trades that were conveyed from lips to ears over phone lines, Cantor Fitzgerald was a pioneer of screen trading. Though the inertia in government bond trading, Cantor's forte, was in voice...

JPM Buys Hedge Fund Back Office.(J.P. Morgan and Company Inc.)(Paloma Partners Management Company L.P.)
February 20, 2006... JP Morgan & Co. has agreed to acquire the middle- and back-office operations of Greenwich, Conn. hedge fund Paloma Partners, rounding out a servicing portfolio that will be consolidated within a new business group: JP Morgan hedge fund...

Sign of ECN Life: Upstart Slashes Its Prices.(Electronic Communications Network)(Bats Trading)(David Cummings)
February 20, 2006... Bats Trading, an electronic communications network (ECN) that was launched last month, is significantly undercutting competitors' fees starting March 1. It's an aggressive bid for market share and a sign that a business reshaped by regulations...

SEC's XBRL Initiative Gains Momentum.(Securities and Exchange Commission)
February 20, 2006... The Securities and Exchange Commission is ratcheting up its efforts to encourage the use of the extensible business reporting language (XBRL) in regulatory filings: The agency recently announced a test program under which it will expedite...

CDS at the Fed, Part Deux.
February 20, 2006... The Federal Reserve Bank of New York's Feb. 16 follow-up meeting with the 14 elite dealers of credit default swaps (CDS)--in alphabetical order, from Bank of America to Wachovia--came off quietly and without the fanfare of the original Sept. 15...

People in the News.(Mark Redwood takes charge of the sales and trading division of Reuters Group)(Jack Vensel has joined Automated Trading Desk)
February 20, 2006... Reuters Group last week said Mark Redwood will take charge of the sales and trading division, the company's largest, accounting for 65 percent of revenues. The division serves equity, fixed income, treasury, commodities and energy customers,...

Self-Regulatory Pendulum.
February 20, 2006... On Dec. 6, when the membership of the New York Stock Exchange voted to approve its merger with Archipelago Holdings, Securities Industry Association president Marc Lackritz wasted little time issuing a statement praising the move as "an...

Capco Buys FundClear, Nucleus for Hedge Servicing.(FundClear Solutions)
February 20, 2006... Financial industry consulting firm Capco has acquired London-based FundClear Solutions, which becomes part of a new Capco hedge fund services unit. Terms of the deal, which was completed in December but not announced until Feb. 15, were...

FutureTrade, QSG Form Analytics Alliance.(Quantitative Services Group)
February 20, 2006... High-tech trading and execution services provider FutureTrade announced a strategic partnership last week with Quantitative Services Group (QSG), a Naperville, Ill.-based consulting firm that specializes in investment research and analysis for...

MetaMatrix Gears Data Products for SOA.
February 20, 2006... Data service management systems vendor MetaMatrix is announcing this week a new product to improve design and execution capabilities in the service-oriented architectures (SOA) that many financial firms are adopting, as well as an enhanced...

Grid Computing Vendor in Hardware Alliance: DataSynapse and ClearCube seek to boost mutual customers' computing performance.(ClearCube Technology Inc.)
February 20, 2006... Two companies that have separately promoted high-performance computing innovations for the financial industry have formed a strategic partnership to combine their software and hardware into a grid computing platform for compute-intensive...

IBM Rolls Out New Blades, Forms Alliance to Promote Them.
February 20, 2006... IBM Corp. is rolling out a new line of blade server technology that it says can move data up to ten times faster than existing alternatives. Unveiling the products, dubbed BladeCenter H, earlier this month, IBM said it will usher in a new era...

Jefferies, a Clearer Itself, Is Shopping as a Correspondent.
February 20, 2006... The investments that some major clearing firms have made to support high-net-worth financial advisory services may soon pay off for at least one of them--thanks to a company that is a successful correspondent clearer in its own right....

Fujitsu Out, Hitachi In as Osaka Exchange Upgrades: Setback for Japanese computing giant that has been under fire in Tokyo.
February 20, 2006... The Osaka Stock Exchange (OSE) confirmed last week that it is in the process of replacing its old Fujitsu trading system with a platform by Hitachi. Fujitsu's technology has figured in system problems in recent months at the Tokyo Stock...

Proxy Challenger Boosted by Funding.
February 20, 2006... Swingvote is trying to cut a wedge into Automatic Data Processing's (ADP) dominance of the U.S. proxy processing business by making ballot-casting and recordkeeping services free for institutional investors through an entirely Web-based...

NYSE's Star Matrix System Adds Tools for Examiners.
February 20, 2006... Upgraded productivity tools at the regulatory arm of the New York Stock Exchange promise to save its examiners time. Some of these tools may ultimately be offered to member firms as well. In 2004, the exchange introduced the Statistical...

Block-Crossing Networks Gain Ground.
February 20, 2006... The integration of block-crossing networks is aiding institutional traders in anonymously moving large blocks of stock at relatively modest market impact costs, according to a TowerGroup study released last week, titled "Crossing Networks:...

Data Council Taps Atkin; GoldenSource Gets CIBC.(Enterprise Data Management Council)(Mike Atkin)(Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce to use GoldenSource Customers and Counterparties product)
February 20, 2006... The Enterprise Data Management (EDM) Council, formed last year by GoldenSource Corp. and several other companies seeking to promote knowledge and deployment of comprehensive data management technology, has tapped information services veteran...

BT Launches Touch-Screen Turret.(British Telecommunications PLC)
February 20, 2006... Trading-position supplier BT has launched a touch-screen version of ITS.Netrix, a new addition to the company's line of multimedia turret installations. One of the unique aspects of the touch-screen offering is that the user can customize...

Success Pains: Dublin's Costs Rise.
February 27, 2006... With an educated, English-speaking workforce and enticing tax and regulatory incentives, Ireland grew into the largest "offshored IT and IT-enabled" location in the world, according to United Nations data. Dublin's status as a capital of...

Treasury Shuffle: From Ofac to FinCEN.
February 27, 2006... A week ago, Robert Werner, who had headed the U.S. Treasury's office of foreign assets control (Ofac) for less than 17 months, became director of another Treasury agency, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). It may be a case of...

SEC Rule Puts Strain On Funds and Distributors.
February 27, 2006... The buy side is growing increasingly alarmed about a recently imposed Securities and Exchange Commission regulation to prevent market timing--a case where the cure could be almost as bad as the disease. Rule 22c-2, which took effect in...

Getting the Chinese Bond Market In Gear: Italy's MTS tries to kick-start effort to export European fixed-income expertise.(Industry Overview)
February 27, 2006... Like much of China's financial infrastructure, the country's bond market is in a state of illiquid and opaque infancy. But the Chinese are also open-minded. Just as the country's exchanges have looked to counterparts in the West--including the...

Administrators Decentralize Outside Dublin.
February 27, 2006... While Dublin is facing challenges to its supremacy as a hedge fund administration hub, Ireland remains attractive enough for administrators to look at other nearby cities with less expensive labor pools and real estate. PFPC International,...

How Big Is Ireland, Anyway?
February 27, 2006... According to the most recent United Nations Conference on Trade and Development World Investment Report, Ireland is home to 25 percent of the world's "offshored IT and IT-enabled services." Irish officials tout that number-one ranking to...

Funds Square Off Against the 38a-1 Challenge.
February 27, 2006... Mutual funds and advisers are scrambling to finish their first annual adequacy and effectiveness evaluations under the Securities and Exchange Commission's Rule 38a-1. The rule calls for adoption of written policies and procedures that spell...

Penalty Watch.
February 27, 2006... The short month of February has been long on regulatory penalties. Last week the Securities and Exchange Commission, despite hinting that its enforcement actions might become a bit less costly after spiking to record heights in the recent wave...

People in the News.(Brief Article)
February 27, 2006... Jefferies & Co. has hired a six-person team to build up its hedge fund servicing capabilities. It's led by Glen C. Dailey and moving en masse from Banc of America Securities, where Dailey was managing director and COO of prime brokerage...

Hedge Funds Unconfidential.
February 27, 2006... The great baseball-playing philosopher Yogi Berra once said, "If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be." That's because if there were nothing with which to compare the perfection, "how would you know" the difference? Hedge funds--OK, it's a...

Ferguson: A Regulatory Vision.
February 27, 2006... Hardly had the new Federal Reserve Board chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, gotten his seat warm when, last Wednesday, Federal Reserve vice chairman Roger W. Ferguson Jr. submitted his resignation. According to his letter to President Bush, he intends...

Into the Post-Merger Trenches.(online brokerage business )(Company Profile)
February 27, 2006... Upon the completion of its merger with TD Waterhouse a month ago, Ameritrade Holding Corp. nearly doubled its customer base. The new TD Ameritrade Holding Corp. reported a shade over 6 million total accounts at the end of January. Of those,...

IBM in a New Light Down Under; Computer giant enters master trust business through Russell deal.
February 27, 2006... With assets expected to triple to $1.9 trillion over the next ten years, according to research firm Alliance Global Investors, Australia's pension market is raising the interest level of a host of managers from around the world--not least...

Tokyo Earmarks $27 Million for Hardware.
February 27, 2006... In one of its first tangible investments to improve its tattered infrastructure, the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) plans to spend more than JPY3.2 billion ($27.3 million) to upgrade its order-handling capacity by May. "All of the money will...

H&R Block Tries a New Anti-Fraud Tool.
February 27, 2006... There have been two main ways to protect online brokerage operations from fraud: with back-office systems that track transactions and detect anomalies that might indicate money laundering, for example; and with intrusion-detection and...

Instinet Launching Outsourcing Service, ATS in Europe.
February 27, 2006... If it is true, as many observers of the trading systems industry believe, that Europe is a bit behind the U.S. in terms of algorithmic trading and related technologies, then Instinet is doing its part to close the gap. The New York-based...

Goldman-Backed Developer Touts Java Breakthrough.(Terracotta)
February 27, 2006... Terracotta, a two-and-a-half-year-old technology shop in San Francisco, plans to announce today that it has completed a $13.5 million round of financing led by Goldman Sachs & Co.'s venture investment arm. The second-round funding announcement...

Analysis: Blue-Chips Get a Nasdaq Tier of Their Own.
February 27, 2006... By adding a listings tier for the largest-capitalization companies with the greatest trading volume, the Nasdaq Stock Market is taking its competition with the New York Stock Exchange up another notch: The new, third tier, known as the Nasdaq...

CSS Loses Another Top Executive; Financial Hurdles Continue to Mount.(Comprehensive Software Systems)
February 27, 2006... Comprehensive Software Systems (CSS) has begun another year facing new challenges, including the recent departure of one of its co-presidents. Martin J. Bentsen abruptly left the Golden, Colo.-based trading software provider on Feb. 17. He...