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BREAKING NEWS
July 6, 2007
Exchanges Race To Invent New Bets
Amid a Merger Wave, They Seek Products With Fatter Margins
To understand why financial markets from Chicago to Sydney are scrambling to merge with each other, step inside the tidy office of John "J-Lab" Labuszewski overlooking the Chicago River.

Mr. Labuszewski, a goateed researcher known for his scientific demeanor, is part of a growing movement transforming global markets. He works at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange designing ever more exotic "derivatives" -- futures and options contracts that let investors bet on anything from the temperature in Osaka to the next move in home prices in Denver.

Global derivatives trading on exchanges has grown nearly 30% a year on average since 2001 to reach almost 12 billion contracts last year. The value of exchange-traded financial derivatives measured by the Bank for International Settlements is now about $87 trillion; that's more than double the value in 2003. Mr. Labuszewski's exchange, known as the Merc, surpassed the New York Stock Exchange in market value in 2003. This all helps explain why exchanges are in a merger frenzy: They want one another's hot trading products.

The four biggest futures exchanges have launched more than 300 new derivatives since 1999 -- about 40% of them from Mr. Labuszewski's team -- and winning formulas are getting harder to find. Far more attempts become flops than hits. So the exchanges are in a race to come up with the next successes -- and to acquire rivals to get control of their star products.

Some Wall Street firms have opposed a Merc bid to take over CBOT Holdings Inc., which owns the oldest U.S. futures exchange, the Chicago Board of Trade. The Merc is in a bidding war with Atlanta-based rival IntercontinentalExchange Inc. If the Merc prevails in a CBOT shareholder vote Monday, it would likely again rank as the world's largest exchange by market value; recently Germany's Deutsche Börse and the NYSE have been outpacing it. (The U.S. Futures Exchange has launched a futures contract inviting bets on the outcome.)

Until the past few years, most stock and commodity exchanges were clubby nonprofits where buyers and sellers simply met to trade. But as technology transformed trading and increased competition, at various points the exchanges -- especially the stock exchanges -- saw their margins fall. Most exchanges became for-profit corporations and invested in giant computer trading systems to survive by lowering their costs.

Futures trading poses significant risk, partly because the contracts -- which represent promises by the parties, not actual ownership of the assets -- can be entered into with a small initial payment even though the contracts themselves are often very large. Some contracts have been banned after they were associated with market disruptions. Futures contributed to a celebrated Dutch mania of the 1630s, when tulips became fashionable in European cities and speculators bet wrongly that prices would keep soaring.

In 2000, Washington loosened regulations and gave exchanges new leeway to sell futures based on more esoteric concepts.  As exchanges find new triumphs more elusive, they're casting their nets farther. Their latest focus is on derivatives based on companies' credit and solvency.
The Wall Street Journal


July 2007
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Big Flameout Throws Another Exchange on the Frenzy
Category: NEWS
By: Pete Kendall, July 6, 2007

You have already read of the billion-dollar debacles at Barings Bank, Long-Term [sic] Capital Management, Enron and other institutions that speculated in leveraged derivatives. It is traditional to discount the representative value of derivatives because traders will presumably get out of losing positions well before they wreak destruction. Well, maybe. It is at least as common a human reaction for speculators to double their bets when the market goes against a big position. At least, that’s what bankers might do with your money.
Conquer the Crash

trade floorThis is a pretty good synopsis of history’s greatest boom in the demand for financial paper. The Elliott Wave Financial Forecast covered the implications in a January Special Section, “2007: THE YEAR OF FINANCIAL FLAMEOUT.” Here’s an excerpt:
Even the most pessimistic economists and central bankers see little sign that the liquidity boom, and the benign financial environment that it has fostered will disappear soon. Confidence in the current environment stems from financial innovations and new financial players that have helped disperse risk more quickly and more broadly than ever before. While the argument that things are different has always been dangerous, many economists now subscribe to the brave new cycle, or a cycle in which the ups and downs have become much more muted, largely thanks to the stabilizing influence of new financial technology.

A cycle that doesn’t cycle? We heard the same thing in January 2000 when belief in the New Economy grabbed hold amid assurances that the business cycle had become an anachronism. This time, “financial innovation” replaces technology as the holy grail of economic growth. Our chart shows that the influence of finance has been growing for three decades, but only now is its “magnitude and persistence” itself the reason for the boom. The psychology is so powerful, and dangerous, that many of the financial system’s most fundamental weaknesses are listed as strengths: it’s “easier for the less creditworthy to borrow than ever before;” “the biggest banks don’t hold much debt, having sold it on to others;” securitization has distributed debts “far and wide, so no single holder has significant exposures;” derivatives insure “the holders of debt against losses.” But the pervasive spread of risk doesn’t mitigate it, it simply intensifies it and snares everyone.

One of the things the subprime experience shows us is just how wrong the pundits were when they said, “The biggest banks don’t hold much debt, having sold it on to others.” Within a few weeks of that statement, realizations hit about how dangerous the boom in mortgage securitization is because banks passed on much of the riskiest mortgages to far flung individuals and pension funds. Turns out these are very cumbersome to deal with in the event of default. The subprime experience also points out that many instruments don’t pay off even when holders are properly positioned on the short side of a falling asset class. So, the other statement about derivatives insuring holders against loss will likely turn out to be bogus, also. Another lesson brought to us by the subprime mortgage debacle is the one discussed in the entry form Conquer the Crash above.  Several of the latest fiascos hit because fund managers like those at the helm of Bear Stearns' Hige Grade Structured Credit Strategies Fund bet the bottom was at hand for subprime. This turned out to be every bit the bad idea that CTC suggested it would, and it is costing Bear Stearns dearly. 

Many of these tools didn’t even exist until the last two or three years, so pundits sometimes warn that there is no way to know how they will perform in a bear market. But our position is that the whole pyramid of exotic financial instruments rests on a cushion of hot air we call the “liquidity boom,” which has pushed them higher over the course of the last five years. We are convinced that the air will rush out as credit contracts and a deflationary depression grabs hold. 

This potential is confirmed by the frenzy for financial exchange and the exchanges that sponsor it. As EWFF also noted in January, “A century of NYSE seat price history shows that extremes in the demand for exchanges come at major peaks.” The bidding for the Chicago Board of Trade as well as a slew of exchange IPOs signals that demand for paper assets and their exchange has never been greater. Thus we observe the slow but ever-so-steady progress toward a peak financial experience. For those that aren’t caught in it, it will be a great one to tell the grandkids about.

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