ELECTRONIC TRADING NEWSFLASHES

Hotspot FXi hired James Curley to serve as director. Curley will be involved in developing strategic relationships with futures exchanges, commodity-trading advisors, hedge funds, futures brokers and prime brokers as well as focusing on product development and technology initiatives. Curley held several senior-management positions at futures, securities and managed futures firms, including Cresvale International (US) LLC; Republic Bank New York Securities Corporation, Prudential Securities and E.F. Hutton & Co. Most recently, Curley founded his own firm, which specialized in alternative-investment-product development, trade-processing and prime- brokerage services on electronic-communications networks. He is a former director and executive committee member of the Chicago Board of Trade and previously served on the boards of the Futures Industry Association and the National Futures Association.

Swiss-German derivatives exchange, Eurex, appointed Satish Nandapurkar as chief executive officer of U.S. Futures Exchange LLC (Eurex). The new U.S.-based futures exchange is waiting for approval as a regulated U.S. exchange from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Nandapurkar joins from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where he served as managing director and head of products and services. Nandapurkar's previously held senior management roles at Swiss Bank Corporation where he served as managing director and global head of exotic options, as well as managing director and global head of foreign exchange options at Bank of America. He entered the financial-services industry as a floor trader for Chicago-based options trading firm O'Connor & Associates in 1988. He holds a Master's degree in economics from Boston University and a Bachelor of Science in computer science and engineering from MIT.

TradeWeb's trading volume increased 70 percent in 2003 over 2002, reaching $18.3 trading volume. The volume growth was distributed across the entire range of fixed-income asset classes available over TradeWeb's global network. In Europe, the e-commerce platform experienced record volumes, coupled with the addition of seven new dealers to the European platform. In 2003, TradeWeb's European volume surpassed 1.9 trillion euros, an increase of 100 percent over the prior year. In addition, more than 300 buy-side firms electronically allocated over 550,000 block trades during 2003 via TradeWeb's TradeXpress STP Network. Total allocations volume was up 75 percent over 2002.

Lava Trading partnered with Portware, a provider of automated trade-management systems whose software is used by basket, algorithmic and quantitative traders. With the integration of the two systems, Portware now offers customers the ability to utilize Lava's sophisticated order types directly from the Port system. Portware's users will receive intelligent order routing and direct connectivity to all major pools of liquidity, including Nasdaq, listed exchanges, electronic-communications networks and alternative- trading systems. In a prepared statement, Lava's CEO and Chairman Richard Korhammer, notes, "This best of breed partnership will extend to Lava users a greater breath of quantitative solutions which are gaining popularity among both buy-side and sell-side traders." Portware specializes in basket, index and automated-quantitative trading of global equities, options, futures and FX. Separately, Wave Securities, an institutional broker owned by Archipelago Holdings, added Portware's portfolio-based management system to its suite of front-end products for buy-side customers. Wave is adding Portware to help institutional traders easily automate, control and customize their basket, algorithmic and program-trading activities while maintaining anonymity and neutrality.