09:48 AM
ELECTRONIC TRADING
Rand Financial Services, Inc., a Chicago-based futures commission merchant (FCM) has renewed its software licensing agreement with Rolfe & Nolan for RISC, the vendor's comprehensive futures and options back-office processing system.
Thomson Financial has expanded the content and added decision support tools to Thomson AutEx Fixed Income(AutEx FI)-- a real-time network for aggregating subject bids and offerings in the institutional fixed-income market. AutEx FI 2.5 provides an anonymous view of a single pool of commingled dealer inventory as well as the ability to search, sort and monitor inventory by security, industry or dealer. Users can now create target lists for tracking recent bids and offers, and upload client portfolios to match current holdings against dealer inventory. Also, clients can send their portfolios directly to their sales coverage. Currently, 125 buy-side and 78 sell-side firms use AutEx FI -- with approximately 3,000 issues and over $5 billion passing through the system daily -- to streamline pre-trade information and order flow between trader, salesperson and client.
TradeWeb--an online fixed-income-trading platform--reported record growth in trading volume in 2002, it's fifth full-year of operation-- with $10.8 trillion executed on the global trading network. Volume reached peak levels of over $80 billion per day, while monthly volumes exceeded $1 trillion, the company says. The system is used by 19 major dealers and more than 1,200 investment firms in 24 countries.