That is the motto of the Boy Scouts and ELX Futures CEO Neal Wolkoff — in town to host the LaSalle Street Dinner Dance, which benefits the Chicago Area Council of Boy Scouts of America— was prepared to tout the performance of his exchange two weeks after it began trading.
“We have been increasing volume every day. I want to get to the point where [CME Group is] asking us for fungibility,” Wolkoff joked.
When I spoke with ELX CEO Neal Wolkoff in an interview in October about his appointment to ELX, I asked him about the hold up in the new exchange actually starting to trade products. He said “We don’t feel it benefits us or the market to be performing on reality TV, so [launch preparations are] not being done in a public way, but [they're] being done.” Now all of the behind the scenes work has come to fruition as ELX has set a launch date for live trading. Futures trading in Treasury securities on ELX scheduled to begin in June, subject to CFTC approval.
I kid ELX! The Electronic Liquidity Exchange (ELX), which announced its launch in December of 2007, came up with a name in March of 2008, then sponsored a splashy cocktail party at last year’s FIA Boca conference, has finally gone online.
The exchange also was famously compared to laxative Ex-Lax by CME Group chief executive Craig Donohue at last year’s Boca conference. ELX, whose investors include a consortium of investment banks along with GETCO and Peak6-Breakwater, expects to offer quarterly futures contracts on two- and five-year Treasury notes, the 30-year bond, and long-term Treasury notes and has filed an application with the CFTC to become a Designated Contract Market. Now you can visit their Web site and read all about it.
At long last, the new futures exchange has a name: ELX Electronic Liquidity Exchange. The name was announced yesterday at the Futures Industry Association’s conference in Boca Raton, Fla. The exchange, formed by a consortium of 12 financial institutions including investment banks, hedge funds and technology provider eSpeed, has been surrounded by ambiguity since the announcement of its launch in December. One of its early “code names” was Four Seasons. First it had a CEO, then it didn’t, and in the meantime several people were rumored as candidates for the position. A headquarters and key staffers were not named yesterday. Today, ELX launched an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) program to support access to the exchange, wherein participating ISVs will provide connectivity to institutions trading on the exchange. ELX said it is “committed to creating deep liquidity [and] providing rapid execution by leveraging the electronic trading system of eSpeed.”
