EXCHANGE NEWSWIRE, 23 May 2012
US Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) approved an initial list of clearinghouses which will be designated as “systematically important”, although the specific clearinghouses were not disclosed, Reuters reported. The clearinghouses which make up the list would be able to gain access to the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending facilities but would also have to comply with tough new rules on capital, liquidity and how much exposure they can have to other firms.
NDAQ is being sued by an investor for the exchange’s negligence in handling orders for Facebook shares after its IPO, which resulted in losses for investors, Reuters reported.
NDAQ’s head of transaction services Eric Noll said that NDAQ would have delayed Facebook’s IPO and “by no means would have gone forward with a print” if it had known the extent of the technical problems that disrupted the listing, and the problems that would be encountered “in continuous trading in a normal trading day.” Noll was also quoted in the WSJ saying that “if we had known that our solution was inadequate, we would have fixed the issue with the right solution before going forward.”
LSE: UniCredit and Banca Intesa Sanpaolo priced the sale of their LSE shares at GBp 960 each, and have now sold all the stakes in the London exchange. Unicredit previously had 6.1% and Intesa had 5.4%, which made the Italian banks the third and fourth largest shareholders respectively, Reuters reported. LSE’s two largest shareholders are still Borse Dubai, which owns a fifth of the shares, and the Qatar Investment Authority, with a 15% stake, according to the Financial Times.
CME will allow brokers to trade both futures and swaps based on oil, natural gas, gasoline and heating oil on a single electronic screen, instead of on two systems as is currently done. CME OTC Solutions unit managing director Michel Everaert also said that “a lot of the elements in the proposals for swap-execution facilities are in CME Direct”, although Dodd-Frank rules have yet to be finalized.
CBOE: CFE launched trading in CBOE NASDAQ-100 Volatility Index (VXN) futures. There will initially be only four consecutive monthly contracts listed, compared to VIX futures which have contracts with expirations trading for the next nine months.
Euroclear appointed Saheed Awan as its head of central securities depository (CSD). Awam was previously director and head of global securities financing at CSD Clearstream from 1993 to 2008, after which he worked for two years as a consultant before joining consultancy Global Collateral Management Services as a partner.
US Agriculture Department (USDA) will seek public suggestions on whether to change the current release times of farm data reports now that futures markets are open nearly 24 hours.
DTCC is studying whether the US securities industry should reduce the time taken to process transactions to less than current time of three days. According to Bloomberg, a shorter cycle would mean firms could post less capital to the clearing fund run by DTCC’s subsidiary National Securities Clearing Corp.
Chi-X Japan launched hosted risk controls, which are aimed at offering cost advantages to brokers and latency-sensitive traders by removing the need for them to have their own systems. According to Chi-X Japan CTO Samson Yuen, “the additional risk controls add less than ten microseconds of latency”, the Trade News reported.
Mexico’s National Banking and Securities Commission aims to finish new regulations which will see OTC derivatives complying with G20 guidelines by the year-end. According to spokesman Carlos Lopez-Moctezuma, the changes do not require congressional approval, Bloomberg reported.
