Townsend Analytics Set to Expand the Reach of RealTick to the LSE, Euronext Paris and OneChicago

Townsend Analytics, a direct-access trading-system vendor, plans to build electronic order-routing interfaces to the trading engines employed by the London Stock Exchange, Euronext Paris and OneChicago. TAL -- which already provides electronic connectivity to a multitude of electronic communications networks and stock exchanges across the United States and Europe via its flagship RealTick trading platform -- expects to go live with its new interfaces sometime in the first half of 2003.

Stuart Townsend, president of TAL, says the RealTick links to the LSE and Euronext Paris -- the French stock market arm of the pan-European Euronext exchange --will enable TAL to penetrate further into the European market. TAL, he says, has already developed electronic interfaces to stock exchanges in Germany, Italy, Switzerland and Spain, as well as to Eurex -- the all-electronicGerman/Swiss derivatives market.

Currently, says Townsend, electronic order routing to European exchanges accounts for 10 percent of TAL's business. That figure should rise once TAL completes its RealTick interfaces to the LSE and Euronext Paris, but Townsend declines to make any predictions on the company's European growth.

Simultaneous to its development of new European interfaces, TAL also plans to build a RealTick link to CBOEdirect -- the core matching engine of OneChicago, a recently-launched single stock futures (SSF) exchange. Townsend says that TAL has already developed a RealTick interface to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange's Globex -- an electronic-trading system that some OneChicago participants are using to route orders to CBOEdirect. But TAL also wants to give its customers the option of routing their SSF orders directly to CBOEdirect, and expects to go live with a RealTick interface to that system "within the first six months of 2003," says Townsend.

TAL is also currently evaluating whether it should develop a RealTick interface to Liffe Connect, the trade-matching engine employed by Nasdaq-Liffe Markets (NQLX) -- a single-stock futures exchange jointly owned and run by the Nasdaq Stock Market and London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange. Townsend says that TAL will develop an NQLX interface only if it hears sufficient customer demand for such a link. "We're currently evaluating this .... (But), to date, there hasn't been any huge groundswell of support for single-stock futures," he notes.