Tom Steinert-Threlkeld

Nasdaq OMX Group and a European provider of direct access to securities markets said they will provide “dynamic” pre-trade, at-trade and post-trade controls to broker-dealers serving high-speed trading firms.

NYSE Euronext and Deutsche Börse stepped up their proposal to divest assets in their derivatives businesses, in their effort to win clearance from European regulators for their merger.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch said it will market a broker-neutral trading platform named Thunder, to institutional customers in Asia.

LPL Financial said it has added more than 500 net new advisors this year, bringing it close to 13,000. The additions came as the company prepared hikes in the fees it charges them.

The average price tag for a data breach now is $7.2 million. How are you supposed to value the loss when your crown jewels – trading algorithms – get put on data sticks or uploaded to remote servers, as happened to Goldman Sachs? And if you're a financial advisor or smaller advisory firm, how do you safeguard data while also taking advantage of social media and mobile devices to service your clients? Here's what you need to know and do to protect your firm and your clients.

A “network connectivity issue” involving a next-generation trading system from Nasdaq OMX Group took down the $1.2 trillion Australian Securities Exchange for four hours Thursday.

Tweets are 'static content' in the eyes of Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, which operates a network of 18,000 financial advisors.

The amount pales in comparison to the $2.3 billion loss Zurich investment giant UBS took in its third quarter for an “unauthorized trading incident” that it says it detected but failed to act on.

BNY Mellon Asset Servicing will allow authorized participants in exchange-traded fund transactions to place orders one day ahead of the actual trade date.

UBS said the “unauthorized trading incident” that led to a $2.3 billion loss in its third quarter was not “sufficiently investigated” when detected.

Deutsche Boerse said its derivatives exchange, Eurex, completed the re-location of its matching engines to a single data center. The Eurex trading and clearing infrastructure is now located in a Frankfurt data center operated by Equinix. In July, Deutsche Boerse moved its Xetra electronic stock trading market to the same data center.Eurex and Equinix had already been offering a co-location service in that International Business Exchange, since 2006. …

The United Kingdom Competition Commission said it had provisionally found that the acquisition of the largest all-electronic trading facility in Europe by BATS Global Markets would not significantly block competition.

David Blaine is an illusionist, often referred to as a modern-day Houdini. So may be David Blaine Welliver, an investment advisor and operator of a mutual fund based in Buffalo, Minnesota, if the SEC is to be believed.

EDGAR Online said it will start delivering data on over-the-counter stocks that do not report their financial results to the SEC.

ConvergEx Group said it introduced an algorithm that lets portfolio managers take advantage of dark pools.

Cisco Systems said it has commercially introduced a switch that can route trading messages through its circuitry and back out onto a wire in under one microsecond.

Lightspeed Financial said it would begin acting as a prime broker for hedge funds and institutional investors.

The “smoking guns” were dropped in a Chicago river. Only the “guns” were not guns. They were hard drives. And the suspect is not a gangster, a la Al Capone. Instead, it is a programmer and former employee of Citadel, the computer-driven hedge fund in the Windy City.

Direct Edge has been sanctioned for weak internal controls that led to millions of dollars in trading losses and a systems outage.

Clearinghouses, not regulators, should be responsible for imposing risk management practices on clearing brokers when it comes to monitoring their end customers, says the trade group representing futures commission merchants.