Tom Steinert-Threlkeld

The SEC now charges that a Chicago securities dealer whose chief financial officer was a one-time chief financial officer of optionsXpress continued to trade as a customer account under optionsXpress’s auspices, after delisting itself from the only market of which it was a member, the Chicago Board Options Exchange.

Trading on U.S. equity markets averaged 6.6 billion shares a day in March, according to Tabb Group. That was down from 6.9 billion in February.

Here is a step by step rundown on how the SEC says the ‘scheme’ executed by optionsXpress, involved ‘naked’ short selling, with failure to deliver the securities involved in the trades. Or ... it did not.

The NYSE this week said that its volume of trading in U.S. stocks fell 24% in one year. Here is a series of stats showing how numbered the days of stocks are.

The "mass affluent" service of Bank of America has launched "co-browsing" and speech analytics projects to improve the interactive experiences of clients of its 750 financial advisors in call centers and 600 in banking centers.

Wall Street Horizon said it will send dates and date changes “within 1,000 milliseconds” of announcement. Deutsche Boerse units extend pooling market to short-term funding. New York Portfolio Clearing launched a Portfolio Risk Interactive Margin Estimator. Credit Suisse releases a “calendar roll” algorithm for fixed-income trading. LCH.Clearnet gets a “nonobjection” to its foreign exchange clearing plan.

The San Francisco company has not made it easy for fund families to work through its online platform, featuring five incompatible sites. That's about to change, with an Investment Manager Gateway.

NYSE Euronext said its trading in derivatives has plunged 21.4 percent in one year, worldwide and its trading in U.S. stocks is also down 21 percent. And its trading in NYSE listed stocks now is less than half of what it was in 2009, at the height of the credit crisis.

Bankers are "bastardizing" the process of terms of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, by threatening to file lawsuits over whether costs and benefits of new rules have been adequately studied, according to Commodity Futures Trading Commission member Bart Chilton.

The heart – and brains – of a Wall Street firm used to be the great sales trader, said Matthew Andresen, co-CEO of Headland Technologies. Now, that value increasingly is moving into machines.

The consolidated audit trail of orders placed and matched on the nation’s stock markets should cost a ‘fraction’ of what the SEC has estimated, according to a financial data expert and author speaking at TradeTech 2012 conference in New York.

SEC Chairman Mary L. Schapiro told a financial services subcommittee of the House of Representatives that the federal regulator intends to spend $100 million of its $1.6 billion requested budget for fiscal 2013 on information systems and another $50 million on modernizing the EDGAR stock information database and www.sec.gov, its public website.

Investment Technology Group said it released an algorithm that will capture matching orders in the opening auctions of the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq Stock Market.

Goldman Sachs said it expanded its suite of algorithms for electronic trading in Brazil, as a part of a “firm-wide focus’’ on the South America market.

The first 725,000 Smith Barney customer accounts moved over to a fresh Morgan Stanley system over the President's Day Weekend. Algo-driven, personalized training of financial advisors and client support personnel is key to the move of records involving nearly $1 trillion in assets.

Bill Gross and his team of bond specialists at Pacific Investment Management Company built the Total Return Fund into the world’s largest mutual fund, with more than a quarter-billion dollars in assets. Can he (and they) repeat the trick, with a Total Return exchange-traded fund?

The shares finished trading on their first day worth $99.96. Altogether, 550,375 shares changed hands on the NYSE Arca electronic exchange.

Nasdaq OMX Group said it entered into a new five-year employment agreement with Robert Greifeld, its chief executive officer.

The chief economist of The Dreyfus Corporation said that world growth will slow down again in 2012, based on International Monetary Fund calculation methods.

NYSE Euronext said its annual report to the SEC that it incurred $85 million of legal, banking and other expenses in 2011 from its unsuccessful plan to merge with Deutsche Boerse.