Securities Industry News articles from September 2007

Securities Industry News archives from September 2007

Markets Are Cast in Problem-Solving Roles~Cantor Fitzgerald's Virtual Trading Platform.
September 3, 2007... As a rule investors hate to wait. The longer it takes to unwind a position the more risk and related stress are incurred. So investors will always seek ways to limit that pain. No one knows the pain of waiting to liquidate better than the...

Markets Are Cast in Problem-Solving Roles~Financial Firms See Promise in Social.
September 3, 2007... In March 2004, then United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan convened a meeting of the Global Compact, a U.N. initiative designed to encourage corporations worldwide to adopt socially responsible policies, to explore opportunities for the...

As Finra Takes Shape, Small Broker-Dealers Voice Concerns.
September 3, 2007... When Jed Bandes started brokerage firm Mutual Trust Co. of America Securities in Clearwater, Fla. 28 years ago, his motivation was to live the entrepreneurial life of an independent representative. "What made being a broker-dealer so attractive...

Retail Bond Platforms on the Offensive~With field narrowed, structured products, compliance and analytics are added in response to adviser and client needs.
September 3, 2007... With consumer interest in fixed-income investments on the rise, a trend likely to be stoked by the aging of the population, electronic bond trading platforms in the U.S. are scrambling to add products, analytics and compliance tools for...

Sifma Ready to Test Pandemic Preparedness~Trade group and Treasury lead financial industry initiative.
September 3, 2007... The U.S. financial services sector is preparing for a pandemic testing exercise Sept. 17, sponsored by the Securities Industry & Financial Markets Association (Sifma) and the Treasury Department's office of critical infrastructure protection...

Repo Pooling Extended.(Brief article)
September 3, 2007... The Eurex derivatives exchange's Eurex Repo as of today is the first electronic market in Europe to allow for cross-border liquidity management using a wide range of European Central Bank-eligible collateral. Eurobonds and numerous European...

COO for ICE Clear.
September 3, 2007... IntercontinentalExchange (ICE), which in July named leaders of its European clearinghouse, said last week that Thomas J. Hammond, a director of Chicago Mercantile Exchange parent CME Group, will be president and COO of ICE Clear US, effective...

Portware Points to Asia.(Asian markets )(Brief article)
September 3, 2007... Reflecting growth, actual and potential, in Asian demand for trading technology, New York-based Portware has opened an office in Hong Kong. The company has been servicing clients in the region for about two years, and to be closer to them and...

People In The News.(Rosenblatt Securities)(Thomson Financial-Depository Trust and Clearing Corp)(Standard and Poor's)
September 3, 2007... Agency brokerage Rosenblatt Securities has brought on veteran institutional brokerage executive Jay Indovino as a managing director. Indovino had been president of SunGard Data Systems' institutional brokerage division for five years until...

Stock Quotes--a Fantasy Realized.
September 3, 2007... Imagine you own a business where federal law requires your customers to send you free parts to include in your final product. That product is not subject to competition, and is vital to the industry--your customers must have it to operate. Now...

Securities Lending Upstart Sees Openings.(Company overview)
September 3, 2007... Despite the immense size of the securities lending market, traders almost always use a single provider when borrowing stock to support short sales. While some of the largest hedge funds have multiple prime brokers, enabling them to compare...

Amid Hedge Fund Distress, Opportunities Arise.
September 3, 2007... Until the recent round of market turmoil, talk of hedge fund profits was largely focused on outsize compensation packages and fat fee structures. But with troubled credit markets facing tight liquidity and distressed portfolios, losses at large...

Green Screens Get Makeover With NetManage Technology.
September 3, 2007... For State Street Corp., one of the not-so-hidden excess costs of mainframe systems was the need for training on the aging but still functional technology platforms. By turning to NetManage's OnWeb technology, it was able to turn the old "green...

Fidessa OMS-EMS Approach Embraced by Morgan Stanley.
September 3, 2007... Morgan Stanley has signed on as a preferred solution provider for Fidessa Group's Fidessa LatentZero Execution Management System, essentially agreeing to refer its buy-side clients to the new offering that integrates an order management system...

Chinese Regulators Expand QDII Program.
September 3, 2007... The Chinese government has increased the funds that local institutional investors can take overseas, and domestic firms and their offshore partners are taking steps to capitalize on the new rules. The China Securities Regulatory Commission...

International Stakes High for Agency Brokers~Firms with global profiles find demand in Asia, Middle East and Europe.
September 3, 2007... Perseverance is paying off for those agency brokerages who invested in an international presence. The buy side, including conventional asset managers and hedge funds, is increasingly calling the shots and is looking for electronic trading and...

Competition Intensifies Amid Inevitable Consolidation Cycle ~Technology and global capabilities key as bulge-bracket firms, specialists face off.
September 3, 2007... Over the last few years, the independent agency execution business appeared to be fast becoming an endangered species. While providing unconflicted agency execution is extremely attractive in theory, commission compression, adoption of advanced...

The Broadening of Agency Services ~Independence gives agencies an inherent advantage, says Capis' Wetherington.
September 3, 2007... Agency brokerages became a market force in the 1990s by focusing on buy-side demands for low-cost execution. Today the business is coming full circle: Institutional investors want low-touch trading and algorithmic strategies as well as...

NeoNet Rides Cross-border Wave~Stockholm firm was early to the game, gains new momentum.(Company overview)
September 3, 2007... The exact number of agency brokers is hard to pin down, but the viable independents fall into one of two groups: large firms such as BNY ConvergEx and Investment Technology Group that rely heavily on technology and offer suites of products; and...

BNY ConvergEx's Options Play.
September 3, 2007... Summer 2007 proved to be a busy one for BNY ConvergEx Group. Its Eze Castle Software unit launched its enhanced order management system with integrated execution management capabilities, and, after completing its LiquidPoint acquisition on July...

Reconciliation: Bear Market Practices for Bull Market Growth.
September 17, 2007... After the market turmoil at the beginning of the millennium, the asset management industry enjoyed a period of relative stability and profitability, with several straight years of double-digit asset growth. Yet, as the lessons of history--and...

Vietnamese Firms To List on London Exchange.
September 17, 2007... The London Stock Exchange (LSE) has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange that will allow Vietnamese firms to list on both exchanges simultaneously. "I saw great potential in Vietnam during my visit...

Dark Pools, Reg NMS and the Changing Liquidity Landscape.
September 17, 2007... Joseph Wald is CEO and Kyle Zasky president of New York-based agency brokerage and software developer EdgeTrade. This article is excerpted from their white paper, "From Fragmentation to FAN: Intersection of Reg NMS-MiFID, Dark Pools and...

RBC Dain Builds Wealth-Services Arsenal~An aggressive regional goes head-to-head against top clearers.
September 17, 2007... Regional correspondent clearer RBC Dain Correspondent Services (DCS) has been ramping up its offerings to correspondent broker-dealers' high-net-worth customers, competing in an arena that has been dominated by big, New York-centered clearing...

Thomson Bolsters Wealth Management With Scivantage.
September 17, 2007... Seeking to extend the scope and capabilities of its wealth management platform, Thomson Financial is giving financial advisers access to the data, real-time account management and trading capabilities of Scivantage, a provider of Web-based...

Land of Compliance Opportunity~Foreign vendors need presence and credibility to succeed in the U.S.
September 17, 2007... In a February 2006 report, the Securities Industry & Financial Markets Association said that the industry's total compliance costs nearly doubled between 2002 and 2005, to $25.5 billion. Those regulatory demands have created a growth sector in...

New Platform Joins Restricted Securities Competition.
September 17, 2007... A group of Wall Street investment banks is rolling out a new private placement platform later this month, adding another competitor to what is rapidly becoming a crowded field--the electronic trading of unregistered Rule 144A securities. ...

Are Dark Books Integral to Best Execution?
September 17, 2007... As dark pools of liquidity continue to encroach on quote-displaying markets, especially for larger trades, institutional investors' fiduciary responsibility to seek best execution may require them--and their broker-dealers--to first search for...

From Post-trade to Prediction~Investment Technology Group sees use of cost analysis increasing for pre-trade purposes.
September 17, 2007... As the buy side discovers pre-trade applications for the historically post-trade-oriented discipline of transaction cost analysis (TCA), agency brokerage Investment Technology Group (ITG) is adjusting its strategy accordingly. While...

BNY ConvergEx Enhances Liquidity Management.
September 17, 2007... BNY ConvergEx Group calls its Web-based transaction cost analysis (TCA) platform, which launched in June, a "dynamic" system that enables clients to make informed trading decisions. The product, Perform-Ex, also represents a significant...

Liquidity Crisis Calls for Solutions~Premium for illiquidity drives up costs where opportunities are concentrated.
September 17, 2007... For years, the money management industry was built on the principles of risk and return. Increasingly, however, academics and money managers are recognizing a critical third component to the investment equation: liquidity. While portfolio...

A Capacity Arms Race~Microsoft survey: financial firms scaling up high-performance computing.
September 17, 2007... Eighty percent of respondents in a Microsoft Corp.-sponsored survey said they planned to expand their high-performance computing (HPC) capacity in the next 12 to 18 months; 24 percent said they would add 1,000 nodes or more. The survey,...

Stock Lending vs. Corporate Governance~Shareholder advocates call for transparency; regulators may weigh in.
September 17, 2007... As fund managers become more attuned to corporate governance issues, they are grappling with the difficult task of balancing fiduciary responsibility with shareholder activism when they engage in securities lending. This is a revenue-enhancing...

One More Time Around for FIX, Swift~Partnership could result in standard with multiple syntaxes.
September 17, 2007... The relationship between the FIX and Swift messaging standards devolved from a July 2001 memorandum of understanding (MOU) to pursue a single standard to an impasse in 2006 when FIX Protocol Ltd. (FPL) abandoned the plan. Yet the possibility...

SRO Opponents' Firm Faces Sanctions~Some see payback in Finra charges against clearer.(self-regulatory organization)(Financial Industry Regulatory Authority)
September 17, 2007... Within two weeks of becoming operational, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra), the self-regulatory organization (SRO) formed by the merger of NASD and the member regulation functions of the New York Stock Exchange, filed a...

FinCEN Issues AML Guidance for OTC Derivatives.
September 17, 2007... One month since Section 312 of the USA Patriot Act became final, the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has issued interpretive guidance spelling out the due-diligence obligations of broker-dealers executing...

OMX Is More Than Just an Exchange.
September 17, 2007... For more than 20 years, as it brought together several regional markets under the Nordic Exchange banner, Stockholm-based OMX gained control of about 80 percent of the Nordic and Baltic securities market while also supplying systems to some 60...

New Zealand Adopts Trayport Trading Platform.
September 17, 2007... The New Zealand Exchange (NZX) has gone live with the GlobalVision electronic trading platform from Trayport, a London-based supplier that is currently expanding from its energy trading roots into the securities industry. NZX, which is...

FlexTrade Offers Bids Access.(FlexTrade Systems)
September 24, 2007... As buy-side firms continue to demand access to the proliferating dark pools of liquidity, execution management systems (EMS) company FlexTrade Systems of Great Neck, N.Y. said Sept. 19 that it will provide clients of its FlexTrader platform...

BOX Flips to Maker-Taker.(Boston Options Exchange)
September 24, 2007... In anticipation of an expansion on Sept. 28 of the pilot of penny-increment pricing to include 22 additional options classes, the Boston Options Exchange (BOX) has adopted a "maker-taker" fee structure that parallels NYSE Arca's. The...

New Look for RiskMetrics.
September 24, 2007... A pair of recent acquisitions by leading risk management systems provider RiskMetrics Group--the Center for Financial Research & Analysis in July, and Institutional Shareholder Services in January--led the company to announce the roll-out of a...

Making Procurement Strategic: A 12-Step Process.
September 24, 2007... How happy are you with your procurement process? Is it adding measurable value to your business and increasing competitiveness? Or is it just a cost center that swaths every purchasing decision in bureaucracy? Strategic procurement can be...

Atkins on Regulatory Shortcomings.
September 24, 2007... When Roel Campos stepped down from the Securities and Exchange Commission last Tuesday, after serving as a member since August 2002, he left behind a commission that is now evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. No candidates have been...

As Hedge Funds Grow, So Does Risk~From fraud to exotic instruments, funds face risk management challenges.
September 24, 2007... As hedge funds manage increasingly vast, complex and exotic portfolios, there is a growing concern about portfolio managers' risk and compliance officers' understanding of their risk exposures. Over the past five years, the number of hedge...

Wombat Rolls Tick Capture Tool Into Algo Platform.(Wombat Financial Software)(OneMarketData)
September 24, 2007... In an effort to attract hedge fund managers and other high-frequency traders looking for an algorithm platform with out-of-the box analysis capabilities, market-data feed specialist Wombat Financial Software has integrated tick capture and...

Savvis Links Exchanges, Traders With Low-Latency Hosting.
September 24, 2007... Computer and communications services vendor Savvis has introduced a hosting solution that resolves latency issues by providing traders with direct connectivity to exchanges. With Proximity Hosting, brokerage firms and hedge funds can place...

New Quad-Core Chips From AMD, Intel.
September 24, 2007... New quad-core processors from chip-making competitors Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Intel Corp. will result in more powerful servers that offer improved energy efficiency, lower electricity costs and heightened virtualization capabilities at...

China Eases Restrictions on Corporate Bonds.
September 24, 2007... Chinese firms listed in Shenzhen, Shanghai and overseas will be able to issue corporate bonds more easily under new regulations released by the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) last month. Companies can now issue bonds for any...

Wall Street Ready to Distribute~Focus shifts from accumulation to retirement-income services.
September 24, 2007... Wall Street may look back on 2007 as the year of volatility, but it also has been the year that financial services firms began dealing operationally with the fact that managing the assets of retired customers will soon be just as important--and...

Asia Trades Online~Rates rise in China, peak in Japan.
September 24, 2007... As Asian countries roll out high-speed Internet services, online trading rates are climbing. But adoption by retail investors has been anything but uniform throughout the region. While Japan has the highest online trading rates in the world,...

Citadel and CBOE Weigh In On Penny Pilot Composition.
September 24, 2007... As the U.S. options markets move toward expanding the number of products in the pilot test of penny price increments, a major market participant and the largest U.S. options exchange are calling for the Securities and Exchange Commission to...

Social Investing Picks Up Steam.(Company overview)
September 24, 2007... In recent meetings with asset managers, Northern Trust Co.'s Ray Carney found that the hottest topic of conversation was socially responsible investing (SRI), a method that combines the need for financial profit with environmental, social and...

IW Makes SRI Personal.
September 24, 2007... IW Financial says it has a more objective approach to socially responsible investing (SRI) than some of the realm's more traditional players. It doesn't even like the term SRI, preferring to call the field ESG--environmental, social and...

SEC vs. Shareholder Activism.
September 24, 2007... In moves that could sharply reduce the influence of activist shareholders, the Securities and Exchange Commission has proposed rule changes, open for comment until Oct. 2, that would allow companies to opt out of the shareholder resolution...