NYX Business Summary for March

By: Ray Pellecchia

File Under: Liffe derivatives, NYSE, NYSE Arca

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Our NYSE Euronext Business Summary for March 2008 came out this morning. Excerpt:

NYSE Euronext reported strong transaction volume growth in U.S. and European trading operations in March 2008, with double-digit increases in trading volume across all of NYSE Euronext's products and exchanges compared to the same period in 2007 and year-to-date. Additionally, NYSE Euronext's cash equity exchanges in Europe and the U.S. achieved new all-time quarterly volume records for the quarter-ended March 31, 2008 with 103 million transactions and 191 billion shares traded, respectively.

The rest of the release and an attached table offer a great deal of detail about our cash, derivatives and listings businesses.

This is a recurring news release about all of our markets in the U.S. and Europe, and I can never decide what to highlight from it. So I decided that every month I'll pick out one factoid that jumps out at me. The factoid of the month for March is:

Average daily volume on NYSE Arca Options increased 67 percent in March 2008 compared with the year-ago month. And that growth exceeds the industry's 41 percent increase during the same period.

And just for a little Friday diversion, some fun facts about the number 67, courtesy of Wikipedia:

• In a Voronoi diagram created using points from the prime spiral, no prime less than 10242 will have a rounder Voronoi cell than 67. If you know what that means, I am absolutely impressed with you.

• Sixty-seven is the atomic number of holmium, a lanthanide. Again, if you know what that means...

• The Ottawa 67's are a junior ice-hockey team established in Canada's centennial year of 1967.

• "Questions 67 and 68" was a song I now can't remember from Chicago's debut album in 1969.

• The registry of the U.S. Navy's aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy is CV-67.

• It also is the highest two-digit number not presently designating any highway in the Interstate Highway System of the United States. So no doggerel from me today listing the cities through which some U.S. highway runs.

• BUT it is the number of the European route E67, the Via Baltica from Prague in the Czech Republic to Helsinki in Finland by way of Poland, Kaunas (Lithuania), Riga (Latvia), and Tallinn (Estonia). And I was trying to come up with a rhyme starting with Helsinki, but the resulting poem was kind of stinky, and I've got to get back to work.

Have a good weekend.