I didn't see the Options Symbology Initiative landing on the front page of the Wall Street Journal or other media outlets. Friday, Feb. 12, 2010 was the big deadline for eliminating the old OPRA five-character codes and phasing in the new 21-character descriptions.Update: On Monday, Feb. 17th, The Options Clearing Corp.(OCC) announced the conversion had been successfully accomplished with firms, clearing members, exchanges and the OCC using the new OSI key. "Five months of industry-wide testing paved the way for an exceedingly smooth transition on Feb. 12, and follow-up reports through Feb. 16 have not revealed any problems with the first major milestone moving toward the new symbology," stated the OCC's release. Member firms certified that they had completed the industry-side scripted testing from September 2009 through January 2010. The next step in the process is consolidation. Completion of the OSI transition is scheduled for mid-May, noted the OCC.

But I find it strange that there hasn't been any coverage of how things went. It's probably a sign that things went off without a hitch. Other industry projects such as Y2k conversion in 2000 and the Euro conversion in 1999 have garnered more media coverage and hysteria about what could go wrong than the options symbology project. Perhaps the world is more focused on Wall Street's bonuses and Greece's debt crisis to pay attention to such a geeky IT project. And lets face it, the nuts and bolts of finding old software code and replacing it with new symbols, pales in comparison to the ramifications of what's going on with Tiger Woods.

With Y2k there were fears about changing all of the internal clocks on computers to read a four-digit year, and about Windows not booting up. There were also worries about computers inside the electrical grid shutting down, recalled Lloyd Altman, senior executive in Accenture's Capital Markets Practice. "The EU switching from 11 currencies to one, on Dec. 1, 1999 had a profound impact on IT departments as well, noted Altman. Likewise with the options symbology project, Altman said this was a data processing project and more cosmetic than something like changing the way that OTC derivatives clear and settle, which he likened to doing open heart surgery. So Altman was not expecting major problems before the conversion began. "I compare it to a Y2k problem. The only logic that is changed is being able to figure out what the actual option is based on the symbol you just received," he said. "If it's a trading interface, someone enters in the underlying stock, the expiration date and the stock price and they receive back a symbol and they trade, it," Altman explained.

Nevertheless, changing the old five-character options codes to the more descriptive and easily readable 21-character symbols has been a huge job for broker dealers, clearing firms and exchanges, according to consultants. Market data providers and order management system (OMS) providers have had to be on top of it. Since we haven't heard anything, one can assume that everything went off without a hitch. Right? But other consultants have warned that something could go wrong. A few weeks ago, Navin Surana, a director and senior project manager at Westwater Corp., a New York-based management consultancy working with broker dealers on the necessary code remediation, said the concern was standalone applications that are not supported by the central IT organization. For instance, there could be a hedge fund inside a larger firm that was running its home grown models in a spreadsheet, connected to Yahoo quoting, which is not usually supported by the central IT department. "Those are standalone applications and you don't know how many exist," he said, adding that most of the time these are one-off applications and they use them on a daily basis, and you're not going to catch it," cautioned Surana.

But all in all, consultants expect the conversion to go well, though they admit,some kinks could surface. Last week, MarketSimplified Inc., a provider of mobile trading applications for brokerage firms and financial institutions, announced a few restrictions on placing options trades on mobile devices for the next week or two. It sent out a system alert via email, stating that options trades on a Blackberry cannot be placed, and that options chains on the iPhone will not work as intended. In addition, the edit order for an option symbol cannot be placed on Windows Mobile, the company said in a system alert. "We should be fully functional with these changes incorporated in a week or two, but in the interim please read this mail carefully to see what restrictions you might face for your respective mobiles in this period," said the Chicago-based company in the email.I didn't see the Options Symbology Initiative landing on the front page of the Wall Street Journal or other media outlets.