ELECTRONIC TRADING BRIEFS

Bear Stearns last week announced its intention to donate at least $10 million to charities benefiting the victims and families of the WTC tragedy. In addition to donating money from its own coffers, the firm plans to establish a charitable foundation that will collect donations from employees. Bear Stearns is currently headquartered in midtown, at 245 Park Ave., but is scheduled to begin moving into its new head office, at 383 Madison Ave., in October.

Interactive Brokers Group LLC, a consortium comprised of a group of electronic brokerage and proprietary trading firms, plans to donate $1 million to the September 11 Fund, a disaster relief fund established by the United Way of America and the New York Community Trust.

GFInet, a New York City-based trading systems vendor, re-opened its offices at 100 Wall on Sept. 17, six days after the vendor relocated its staff to its disaster recovery site. In the wake of the WTC tragedy, GFInet's operations and technology staff also established three additional trading sites, spread across New York and New Jersey. GFInet is also happy to report that all of its employees are safe.

eSpeed, Cantor Fitzgerald's electronic bond trading subsidiary, last week received permission from the Nasdaq Stock Market to temporarily halt trading in its common stock. Cantor, of course, was one of the firms' hardest hit by the WTC tragedy-nearly 700 of its employees are still missing. The bond trading firm expects to make further announcements, clarifying its strategy for eSpeed, in the near future.

patsystems, a front-end workstation software vendor, has teamed up with Direct Access Financial Corp. to launch J-Stox, a front-end trading application intended to provide clients with access to single-stock futures (SSF) exchanges in the U.S. patsystems, which has built its reputation as an independent software vendor in the global derivatives markets, expects to gain access to all of the major U.S. equity exchanges and ECNs via its alliance with DAFC, a provider of U.S. equity trading platforms. Through J-Stox, the vendor partners plan to provide an electronic gateway to the trading engines of U.S. SSF markets, which are scheduled to launch later this year.

The London Metal Exchange has launched release 2 of its electronic trading system, LME Select. Release 2 gives LME member firms the power to trade any of the exchange's contracts electronically.

Xpresstrade LLC, an Internet-based futures brokerage firm headquartered in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange's building, has launched Dynamic Quotes, a Java-based, real-time streaming quote application targeted at self-directed, retail futures traders.