EXCHANGE NEWSWIRE, 02 June 2010

German cabinet approved to ban naked short selling of German stocks, eurozone sovereign bonds and CDS on eurozone sovereign bonds. The bill will pass to parliament. Finance Minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble, expects the bill to pass through both houses of parliament by July 9.

NASDAQ OMX will in 3Q10 implement a single stock circuit breaker -called the NASDAQ Volatility Guard-, which will pause trading based on predetermined thresholds across all NASDAQ-listed securities.

BM&FBovespa and Chi-X Global announced an alliance to create a new service, Chi-FX Brazil, which will use executable FX rates provided by FX liquidity providers to disseminate quotations for BVMF equities to foreign investors in their offshore base currency. The service will also allow foreign investors to enter orders with limit prices in their base currency and facilitate the simultaneous paired execution of the equity and FX legs of the transaction. In this joint effort, Chi-X Global will develop and help support the platform, while BM&FBovespa will market the service to its participants and operate it. The companies plan to begin implementation later this year.

DTCC will publish data compiled from CDS trades registered on DTCC's Warehouse Trust Company. The information includes market activity from June 20, 2009 through March 19, 2010 for all single-named CDS reference entities. Data may reveal which contracts had enough liquidity to be eligible for CCP clearing.

SGX will start trading the SGX Nikkei Dividend Point Index futures on June 17. The contract is based on the Nikkei Stock Average Dividend Point Index, calculated based on accumulated dividends received by investors from constituent companies of the Nikkei Stock Average over a calendar year. It will be the first dividend futures contract in Asia.

TMX: NGX and Alliance Pipeline added Alliance's Canadian Receipt location (APC-CREC) as a cleared trading point on NGX. NGX will offer daily, weekend, monthly and term fixed and indexed physical instruments at the APC-CREC market center. The addition brings the total number of NGX's Canadian clearing locations to 18.

KRX added HTS service to the list of available trading methods for trading KOSPI 200 Futures on Globex, starting June 7.

ELX appointed Catherine Bartzos as the new Chairman of the ELX Supervisory Board. Ms. Bartzos is currently  a Managing Director of JPMorgan.

ELX announced the appointments of Patrick Tray of GETCO; Ryan Sheftel of Credit Suisse and Richard Feldman of Bank of America Merrill Lynch to the ELX Operating Committee.

Bursa Malaysia’s COO Omar Merican resigned.

CME May ADV was a record 16.8 mn contracts, up 58% Y/Y, driven by 72% higher interest rate products ADV. The 3M rolling RPC was $0.809 in April, down from $0.821 in March, due to lower RPC in IR product.

ICE futures ADV rose 44% Y/Y to a record 1.44 mn contracts in May 2010. On a cumulative basis, ICE's CDS clearing houses cleared $9 trillion in gross notional value in more than 195,000 transactions. 3M rolling RPC in May declined four cents in US agri futures and seven cents in US financial products to $2.13 and $0.77, respectively.

ITG linked its EMS product, Triton, with its OMS, Macgregor XIP. The company also upgraded ITG Compliance, aimed at the private wealth market.

MCX-SX market share of FX futures rose to 54% in May.

MCX launched a lead mini future contract. The contract’s market lot size will be one tonne, five times smaller than the standard contract.

Tora will expand its Crosspoint dark pool aggregator to include dark engines in Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore.

TradingScreen launched a new Short Position Reporting functionality for Australian securities that complies with the Short Selling disclosure framework recently introduced by the ASIC.

MSCI completed the acquisition of RiskMetrics. MSCI raised $1.375 billion of debt financing in conjunction with the acquisition, including a $1.275 billion term loan and a $100 million undrawn revolving credit facility.

SunGard will bring together its three global network solutions for routing equities, listed derivatives and fixed income orders to form the SunGard Global Network. SunGard currently offers three different connectivity and routing solutions for securities, depending on the region and asset class. SunGard will nearly double the trading venues and markets its customers can access.

Cielo signed a five-year agreement to be a “preferential issuer” for clients of HSBC Brazil

MF Global announced an offer to exchange shares of common stock of the company for any and all of its outstanding $205 mn of 9.00% Convertible Senior Notes due 2038 and its $150 mn of 9.75% Non-Cumulative Convertible Preferred Stock, Series B. $1,000 of Senior Convertible Notes principal amount will be exchange for 95.7 shares of common stock plus a premium of $445 in cash or stock and accrued and unpaid interest and each share of Preferred Stock will be exchange for 9.6 shares of common stock plus a premium of $41 and accrued and unpaid interest. The offer will expire on June 29.

MF Global commenced an underwritten public offering of up to $150 mn in common stock. Proceeds will be used to fund Convertible Senior Notes and Convertible Preferred Stock Series B exchange offerings and others corporate purposes. JPMorgan, Citi and Deutsche Bank Securities are acting as joint book running managers for the offering.

Interactive Brokers: May cleared DARTs increased +35% m/m (+41% y/y) to 465k, client accounts increased +1.4% m/m (+20% y/y) to 144.4k and customer equity declined -3.5% m/m to $16.4 bn (+45% y/y).

TradeStation May DARTs increased +36% m/m (+8.2 y/y) to 110.4k. Client assets declined -0.6% m/m (+16% y/y) to $2.15 bn and margin balances increased +15% m/m  (+74% y/y).

E*Trade’s 1-for-10 reverse stock split takes effect today. The stock symbol will be ETFCD until June 30.

Visa was upgraded to "Buy" from "Hold" at Stifel Nicolaus. Target price was set at $86.

CFTC’s internal watchdog released a review of the agency's market surveillance operations to determine how well the CFTC enforces speculative limits for large traders, WSJ reported.

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