The Magazine for Securities Industry Professionals

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Four of the six charges against former NYSE chairman Richard Grasso have been overturned regarding his $187.5 million compensation package. The final outcome?

Grasso will settle the case
NY State will not pursue the case
Grasso lost his reputation, regardless
Not Spitzer's worst decision but up there

Previous Polls

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Featured Articles

It's Gray Out There

Nina Mehta
Gray is the new black. Dark liquidity is going gray and the industry is mixed about whether this development is good or bad for investors and the marketplace. Many non-displayed alternative trading systems, a.k.a. dark pools, are expanding their reach. They're no longer as dark or as passive as they initially were. That means orders that enter their pools don't simply cross against other orders resting there or passing through, such as a broker's algorithmic flow. Some pools are getting more aggressive. They're willing

Thrills and Chills

James Ramage
As trading environments go, the current one almost couldn't get any wilder. Experts say today's equities market hasn't been this volatile since the Great Depression. The large jumps in prices have meant greater risk, higher volumes and wider spreads for traders intermittently for more than seven months. But the buyside hasn't crumbled in despair. And their latest electronic tools haven't led them off a cliff, as some expected. Instead, traders have tackled the volatility and adapted. Many have made some key changes to their trading strategies and found ways to lower costs and find opportunities.

Picking Up the Pieces

James Ramage
The scenario sounds simple. You're an institutional buyside trader who just got an order to sell 100,000 shares of an illiquid name at a specific price as soon as possible. Where do you begin? Maybe 10 years ago you'd have shipped it to the New York Stock Exchange floor, where for decades 80 percent of all of its shares traded. But because the market's now far more fragmented, just under 40 percent of listed stocks trade there. So, do you execute it yourself or call a broker? If you handle it yourself, as more of the buyside is, you're faced with a plethora

Handing Over the Keys

Nina Mehta
As institutional investors come to dominate options trading, a growing number are asking their brokers for electronic capabilities to do the trading themselves. That has some brokers scrambling to put direct-market-access tools and execution algorithms on buyside desktops. "As brokers roll out better tools, more people join the marketplace, and exchanges present incentives to provide liquidity, institutions will be able to trade more electronically," says J.P. Xenakis, vice president at Goldman Sachs Electronic Trading. "It's cheaper and it's anonymous." Big-lot traders, he adds, will soon begin asking for more-sophisticated quantitative tools.

No Heroes in "King of Club"

Gregory Bresiger
King of the Club: Richard Grasso and the Survival of the New York Stock Exchange

Old Dogs, New Tricks: Ray Tierney

Michael Scotti
During his 16 months as global head of equity trading at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, Ray Tierney has instituted a number of initiatives-all in the name of increasing access to liquidity and driving down trading costs.

Old Dogs, New Tricks: Keith Gertsen

Michael Scotti
There's good reason why Keith Gertsen, global head of trading at AllianceBernstein, sounds like a risk trader when he talks about the business. He used to be one.

Looking for Action in IOIs

Nina Mehta
They're no more than electronic messages at this point. But a growing number of trading executives argue that indications of interest should be looked at as firm quotes that can be automatically traded against by the buyside. "The nirvana is executable IOIs," says Robert Moitoso, head of the FIX division at NYFIX, an institutional broker and technology provider whose IOI dissemination product has been distributed via the NYFIX Marketplace network for more than two years. "The sellside can spend a lot of money distributing IOIs to their client base. They want to know if they're getting bang

2007 Review: ECNs Get A New Lease on Life

John Hintze
Call it: The Rise of the ECNs, Part 2. Led by Kansas City-based BATS Trading, new electronic communications networks, or ECNs, have once again gobbled up exchange execution volume. Their popularity is reminiscent of the late 1990s, when new order-handling rules gave birth to ECNs such as Island and Archipelago.

2007 Review: Darkness Spreads: Who Turned Out the Lights?

Nina Mehta
The year Regulation NMS was implemented also turned out to be the year of dark liquidity. But in retrospect, the connection isn't simply ironic.

2007 Review: MiFID Spurs Competition in Europe

Nina Mehta
After years of anticipation, MiFID rolled into action on Nov. 1. The Markets in Financial Instruments Directive is a set of rules developed by the European Commission, the European Union's policy arm, that lays the groundwork for an eventual overhaul of the European markets.

2007 Review: Progress Made on OMS-EMS Integration

Peter Chapman
Mating an OMS with an EMS moved beyond the realm of theory this year, easing some frustrations on the buyside. Three of the five major suppliers of buyside order management systems claimed victory in successfully integrating execution management systems into their platforms. The other two are hard at work doing the same. The achievements are notable and expected to make life easier for busy buyside traders.

2007 Review: Riding in Comfort with Customized Algorithms

Alexa Jaworski
Industry observers agree that over the past 12 months, algorithmic trading has taken on a new identity, maturing into more adaptive strategies with better routing features. Algorithms are no longer just another innovative trading tool available to the marketplace. Algorithmic trading has become a necessity for savvy traders seeking to gain access to dark liquidity pools. It is no longer just about volume-weighted average price (VWAP).

2007 Review: NYSE Broadsided by Reg NMS

Peter Chapman
This was not a good year for the New York Stock Exchange. The venerable marketplace got slammed by a rule change pushed through by a federal government determined to modernize the U.S stock market. The move stripped the New York of its protective covering, forcing the largely manual marketplace to compete in an unfamiliar electronic world.

2007 Review: Pennies Roil Options Marts

Peter Chapman
The biggest story of 2007 in the options market was the switch to penny pricing. Under a "pilot" program encouraged by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the nation's six options exchanges agreed to quote a limited number of options classes in either 1- or 5-cent increments, depending on their prices.