ELECTRONIC TRADING BRIEFS

Shareholders of Nasdaq Europe voted to close Nasdaq Europe, a pan-European stock market located in Brussels, with an order to wind down operations expected no later than January 5, 2004. Nasdaq owns more than 50 percent of the market. Nasdaq Chief Executive Officer Robert Greifeld announced the changes as part of a broad review of Nasdaq's business initiatives. Nasdaq will discontinue several initiatives including NQLX, a single-stock futures market joint venture with the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (LIFFE). Nasdaq will transfer its ownership stake to Liffe. Nasdaq is also discontinuing the Bulletin Board Exchange (BBX), Liquidity Tracker and Nasdaq Tools. As a result of these changes, Nasdaq will eliminate roughly 80 positions.

Tony Kirby, a former straight-through-processing executive at Reuters, has emerged at Deutsche Bourse where he is spearheading the exchange's STP effort. He will influence the exchange's reference data and clearing and settlement business via Clearstream. Kirby was previously with Instinet, Swift, Bolero and GSTPA.

FlexTrade Systems unveiled a suite of browser-based tools that enable users to monitor and manage real-time and historical equity trading costs. The product - called FlexTQM (FlexTrade Transaction Quality Management) - is aimed at institutional users on the buy and sell side, including hedge funds, investment managers and broker/dealers that use FlexTrader, an equity-trading and order management system.