Traders sound off; va-va-volume; Earth's biggest floor; Greater China

By: Ray Pellecchia

File Under: Bonds, Liffe derivatives, NYSE, Options

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The UBS trading floor, as pictured in AdvancedTrading.com

I've been a little tied up the last couple of days, so to catch up on some recent news:

Traders Sound Off on the NYSE's Hybrid Market (Traders Magazine) -- Sorry, no link, as Traders Magazine hasn't yet posted this piece online. The magazine surveys 2,941 traders and 87 respond (that's 3 percent -- hey, does anybody know if that's a statistically significant sample? Just asking.) Anyway, the results are mixed. Among other findings: people said they like Hybrid's speed, anonymity and certainty of execution. People disliked Hybrid's performance in executing large trades, and its level of price improvement and volatility. The smaller spreads under Hybrid got little notice, which indicates to me that we're not getting the word out on that. I'm discouraged to see that most respondents said they used floor brokers less now than before Hybrid, or not at all. Those of you who said you use floor brokers the same or more than before, I'd love to hear from you -- how are you using your floor broker(s)?

As our Lou Pastina observes in the article, almost three-quarters of respondents said they did not want to see NYSE go all electronic. Which also echoes what Duncan Niederauer said here:

If I'm hearing the customers properly, they do not want us to be NASDAQ. They do not want another super-fast video game with no price improvement and high volatility. What they want is a market that's fast when they need it to be fast, but also can discover prices for blocks when that's called for.

NYSE Euronext Reports Record Transaction Volume for July 2007 -- Busiest month ever for European and U.S. equities trading, as well as for derivatives trading. New-listings momentum continues...Average daily volumes of 3.1 billion shares handled on NYSE Group resulted in year-over-year gains of 22.8% while more than 28 million transactions were recorded on Euronext cash markets in July 2007, up 87.9% year-on-year. Liffe registered its busiest July ever, with trading up 41.1% from a year-ago. Equity options total volume on NYSE Arca Options increased more than 56% year-over-year, while average daily volume in July improved by 84% year-on-year. (NYSE.com)

Share of trading in NYSE-listed stocks remains an issue, but the business is growing, as is the rest of the place. Or should I say, places. Or marketplaces. Ohhhh, you know what I mean.

NYSE Bonds... attracting market makers... -- Slow uptake on NYSE Bonds... they are ramping up market makers... which is good... (ShopYield blog, commenting on the BusinessWeek article we linked to last week)

Those who think people and trading floors have no role in trading might want to take a look at this. Advanced Trading has an amazing 90-photo essay of UBS's trading floor in Stamford, Ct. Looks like a football field, or two, filled with people and computers, and is noted by the Guiness Book of World Records as the largest in the world: 1,400 seats, 2,000 computers, 5,000 monitors and 1.7 million transactions a day. (AdvancedTrading.com)

WuXi PharmaTech Celebrates IPO on NYSE: With today's listing of this IPO of a pharma/biotech research and development outsourcing firm, NYSE now lists 40 companies from Greater China (Mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan) with a total market cap of $1 trillion. (NYSE.com)

On This Day, John Dryden (1631-1700) was born. I remember a little Dryden from my college-days Anthology of English Literature, a wonderful, four-inch-thick volume (as I remember it, anyway) whose good binding survived an inadvertent flight out of my beat-up 1970 Plymouth Duster, the doors of which tended to occasionally fly open during sharp turns. My dates either sat close to me or wore their seat belts. If I recall, most chose the latter, and as a result of the experience, first dates quickly turned into last dates. But I digress. A selection of Dryden's gems fills more than four pages of my Bartlett's; here are a few for your pondering and pleasure.

War seldom enters but where wealth allures.

Ill habits gather by unseen degrees --
As brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas.

When I consider life, 'tis all a cheat;
Yet, fooled with hope, men favor the deceit;
Trust on, and think tomorrow will repay.
Tomorrow's falser than the former day.

Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
To raise up commonwealths and ruin kings.

For Art may err, but Nature cannot miss.

Fallen, fallen, fallen, fallen,
Fallen from his high estate,
And welt'ring in his blood;
Deserted, at his utmost need,
By those his former bounty fed,
On the bare earth exposed he lies,
With not a friend to close his eyes.

That one reminds me of someone I used to know.

Old as I am, for ladies' love unfit;
The power of beauty I remember yet.

Pains of love be sweeter far
Than all other pleasures are.

Here lies my wife: here let her lie!
Now she's at rest, and so am I.

Couldn't resist that last one, intended as his wife's epitaph. I don't know whether she was alive to read it; if so, it must have landed Mr. Dryden squarely in the missus's doghouse.

Tags: New York Stock Exchange, Hybrid Market, NYSE, NYSE Euronext, NYX, trading, stock market, bonds