Liquidnet To Open Singapore Office

Liquidnet is to open an office in Singapore in November 2008 amid surging interest in the region among its buy-side membership. Liquidnet currently has 109 members signed on to trade Asia-Pacific equities on its platform (as of 31/07/08) which gives institutional investors a protected venue to make large trades without attracting price-altering attention. The office is Liquidnet's fourth in the region after Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Sydney.

"Member interest in Singapore and all of Asia has grown stronger as the global markets have become more challenging," said David Klinger, managing director of Liquidnet Asia. "Buy-side investors representing millions of individual investors are expressing an even greater need in these shifting markets to trade large blocks of Asian stock quickly to preserve the conviction of their trading decisions. That is where we add great value."

Liquidnet already provides trading in Singapore. During the third quarter of 2008, the average value of a trade in Singapore equities in Liquidnet was S$1.8 million.

Greg Henry will manage the office and report directly to David Klinger. Henry was most recently responsible for portfolio trading operations at Liquidnet in New York. He joined the firm in July 2004 having previously worked with Fidelity Capital Market Services, Investment Technology Group Inc. and Instinet Inc.

Liquidnet

Liquidnet is an electronic marketplace that facilitates institutional equities trading for asset management firms worldwide. By giving buy-side traders a first look at a global natural liquidity pool of more than 7.98 billion shares per day of liquidity on average, Liquidnet consolidates and delivers the institutional equities market directly to the desktops of 535 buy-side trading firms. Institutional investors use the Liquidnet marketplace to enhance the quality and speed of trade execution, gain price improvement for their trades, and, ultimately, lower overall trading costs. Launched in 2001, Liquidnet now trades in 30 equity markets across five continents. Liquidnet is headquartered in New York with offices in London, Toronto, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Sydney. Additional company information is available online at www.liquidnet.com.

Traianana

Traiana Inc. (www.traiana.com), an ICAP company, provides global banks, broker/dealers, buy-side firms and e-trading platforms with solutions to automate post trade processing of financial transactions. Traiana's Harmony network is used by over 50 of the world's leading financial market participants and has become the market standard for post-trade processing of foreign exchange transactions.

Traiana's prime brokerage software solution, TRM, is used by market leading prime brokers for the automation of their foreign exchange and derivatives prime brokerage business. Traiana's solutions help to improve relationships between trading partners, reduce operational risk, and to lower costs. Traiana is headquartered in New York City with offices in London and Tel Aviv.

Quod ASOR Extended

Quod Financial, the leading provider of advanced execution technology for the global capital markets, today unveiled its solution for buy-side execution management. Capitalising on the experience and innovative technology of their established sell-side Advanced Smart-Order Router (Quod ASOR), Quod Financial empowers the buy-side by offering a new decision making and order routing technology.
As the European capital markets continue to change dramatically under MiFID, buy-side institutions aim to repatriate in-house the execution intelligence of the sell-side. This translates into having the technology which enables the buy-side to:

- Decide on the execution brokers based on dynamic analysis of quality and performance
- Dynamically decide on the type and quality of broker-based algorithms
- Build a smart-order routing capability to select the final exchanges, MTFs and dark pools. With the advent of liquidity decentralisation and the obsolescence of DMA, this is an increasingly necessary tool

Quod Financial's buy-side ASOR leverages its existing sell-side class technology and algorithms, and brings a new level of dynamic decision making and routing capability to the buy-side community. In addition, it provides the possibility to have a comprehensive multi-asset execution strategy which mirrors the cross-asset investment strategy.

"This is the next step in the evolution of the European capital markets," states Ali Pichvai, CEO and co-founder of Quod Financial.

"Having successfully gained momentum in the post-MiFID sell-side advanced smart order routing space, we have been invited by leading buy-side institutions to reutilise our technology to meet a number of challenges; implementing their complex execution strategies, proactively measuring the quality and performance of their brokers and their algorithms, as well as addressing liquidity fragmentation. We are confident we can meet this challenge, assisting our clients in gaining full independence."

Built on a low latency, high performance infrastructure, Quod ASOR's combination of algorithms and trading-specific Complex Event Processing (CEP) dynamically adjusts the execution pattern of an order against the client's individual best execution criteria. The ASOR is uniquely positioned to provide adaptive decision making and routing, and liquidity management. Quod ASOR is already live and proven with a number of leading international brokers, and is one of a number of advanced execution modules built upon the Quod Advanced Execution platform.

"Our underlying technologies have enabled us to create a smart-order router that is not only well adapted for the sell-side, but is now a viable solution for the buy-side. Our R&D effort continues to position us at the forefront of innovation in this fast-moving field", concludes Pichvai.