2 euronext had been talking to london too and london

2
Euronext had been talking to London too, and London to the Nasdaq (which at one point even held almost 30% of LSE’s
stock). OMX had made a bid for LSE too. In the end, the Nasdaq seems to have ended up as the owner of OMX, with Dubai
as co-owner; OMX is hot because of its software systems.

3
OMX sells a highly regarded trading “platform” (a trading software system), and had over sixty software customers at the
time of writing (most of them not for entire trading platforms, though). Atos Origin, which developed Euronext’s platform, runs
its systems on at least thirteen exchanges. Montreal, which had provided the original electronic order-driven trading systems in
Europe in the 1980s, has successfully sold its SOLA system in Asia; Boston’s Options Exchange also uses it.
4
SEAQ stands for Stock Exchange Automated Quotation; Nasdaq stands for National Association of Security Dealers
Automated Quotation.
5
New York Stock Exchange; American Exchange (also located in New York, right next to ground zero). Amex and Nasdaq
merged in 1998 but broke up again in 2004. Amex has the softest listing and disclosure requirements of all three. It now looks as
if Amex will end up in NYSE’s arms soon.
6
Via DTC’s subsidiary, the European Central Counterparty (EuroCCP).
7
The acronym modestly refers to a Better Alternative Trading System; the founder, Dave Cummings, loves to be pictured
holding a baseball bat “to whack Nasdaq.”
8
The name alludes not to a sexist term for younger persons of the female gender, but to X, for eXchange, and to the Greek chi
(χ), the “cross” that is meant to echo the notion of crossing.
9
NYSE’s interest in Archipelago was not just based on the latter’s electronic know-how, but also in its ownership of a (young)
derivatives exchange. Similarly, one of Euronext’s attractions, to NYSE, was its ownership of LIFFE. The idea is that trading in
stocks and derivatives should be better integrated, including the clearing and settlement. Deutsche Börse has similarly bought
ICE to add to its existing high-flying derivatives exchange, Eurex—itself a merger of Deutsche termin Börse and Switzerland’s
SOFFEX. But this type of integration is across products, not across markets.
10
Nowadays, deliverable bearer shares are getting rare: instead of buying and receiving a piece of paper, the buyer is being
recorded as being the new owner of a share that is physically residing with a clearing organization and custodian like
Clearstream or Euroclear—this is still different from a registered share, where the issuing company is keeping the register; a
securities account with a bank will also do. Deliverable bearer securities are set to disappear altogether, in Europe, by 2015.
11
Both Unilever and Royal Dutch Shell were created by a merger between a Dutch and a British company. For tax reasons
the new working company was, however, 50/50 owned by two holding companies, one Dutch and one British, and the listed