First mover advantage

OXFORD - The turf battle for European equities became yet more complicated last week as the SWX Swiss stock exchange and Tradepoint Financial Networks plc, an AIM-listed rival to the London Stock Exchange, announced that they intend to create a pan-European blue chip exchange called virt-x. The move is backed by the Tradepoint consortium, a collection of high profile blue chip banks and financial services firms including ABN AMRO, CS First Boston, Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Kleinwort Benson, J.P. Morgan, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and UBS Warburg, which has a 54 percent interest in Tradepoint.

SWX will transfer trading in its blue chip stocks to virt-x and will make its EBS trading platform exclusively available to virt-x. This will support trading of the constituents of all the major European indices by the end of the first quarter of 2001. SWX members will become members of virt-x. London-based clearing house Euroclear, the Swiss clearing house SIS, and the London-based Crest trading platform are lined up to provide an integrated clearing and settlement infrastructure. Trading will be in the currency appropriate for the stock...