EXCHANGE NEWSWIRE, 18 May 2010

The SEC and a group of US exchanges are considering market-wide circuit breakers for various time frames that will be triggered if the market falls 5%, 10% and 20%.

A joint CFTC-SEC Advisory Committee on Emerging Regulatory Issues will hold its first meeting on May 24 to discuss the preliminary findings of the market events of May 6.  Joseph Stiglitz will be a member of the Joint Committee.
ELX released a new simplified two-tier fee schedule: $0.35 per contract bundled fee including exchange and clearing and $0.18 per contract for users with ADV above 1,200 contracts.

CME sent a letter to clearing members admitting it experienced problems in handling message flow after the May 6 trading session. The post-trade message delays had no impact on trade matching and order routing according to the company.

LSE will start trading on its new Millennium platform in September and Turquoise may move in August according to the WSJ.

Chi-X Australia appointed Mike Aikins as Chief Technology Officer and Andrew Walton as Business Development Manager. Mr. Aikins was previously Head of Telecommunications, CTO and Lead Architect for the ASX and Mr. Walton has 10 years of project management experience in IT and business development of trading systems, including roles at UBS, BNP Paribas and the ASX,

JSE April trades on the equities market increased +18.2% Y/Y to 7.6 mn valued at more ZAR219.2 bn.

NASDAQ OMX and SunGard launched SunGard's APT, a new risk analytics for a range of selected NASDAQ OMX indexes that provides risk modeling, reporting, attribution and scenario analysis capabilities.

Knight announced a joint marketing alliance with Houlihan Lokey to provide investment banking, capital markets and sales and trading services to their clients. the alliance will focus on equity and fixed-income underwriting. 

Calastone: Redmayne-Bentley connected to Calastone’s independent cross-border transaction network.

European Energy Exchange (EEX) admitted GASPOOL Balancing Services as a trading participant.

Pink OTC Markets 1Q10 net income increased +62% Y/Y to $0.96 mn or $0.09 per share on revenues of $6.6 mn (+23% Y/Y).

SGX: Singapore Mercantile Exchange appointed RBS as settlement bank. RBS will joint ICICI Bank as settlement bank for SMX

MetaBit opened a new office in Hong Kong to promote and support institutional DMA, algo and manual trading across fourteen Asian markets.

Northern Trust filed with the SEC to launch fixed income ETFs.

Jupiter Asset Management plans a £250 mn IPO on LSE next month, which could potentially value the £20 bn fund manager at as much as £1 bn.

Deutsche Bank appointed Jason Locke to its Singapore office to offer U.S. corporate bonds electronic trading to Asia-Pacific customers. Mr. Locke was previously Head of U.S. and European Credit Trading for the region at HSBC in Hong Kong.

Franklin Resources priced $300 mn of 2% Notes due 2013 at 99.823%, $250 mn of 3.125% Notes due 2015 at 99.890% and $350 mn of 4.625% Notes due 2020 at 99.889%. The offering will close May 20 and Banc of America and Morgan Stanley are will act as joint book-runners. The Company will use the net proceeds for general corporate purposes.

Legg Mason and Grail Advisors will introduce a new actively managed ETF, the Grail Western Asset Enhanced Liquidity ETF that will  invest in short-term debt.

TD Ameritrade April DARTs increased +15.1% M/M to 426k; total client assets increased +2.6% M/M to $350.5 bn; avg. spread based balances increased 1.3% M/M to $54 bn and avg. fee-based balances increased +4.2% M/M to $64 bn.

DB1 was upgraded to “Neutral” from “Sell” at Goldman Sachs. Target price was raised to €61 from €52.

Henderson was downgraded to "Underweight" from "Neutral" at HSBC. Target price was cut to £1.30 from £1.35.

US Senate Democrats intend to vote on the OTC derivative bill as early as this Wednesday.

Provided By: Equity Research Desk, www.erdesk.com