Chicago trading-firm executives gloated when SunGard Futures Systems’ audacious bid for rival Rolfe & Nolan fell through last month.
After all, they had been worried that SunGard would have used its near-monopoly in back-office computer systems to jack up prices.
On top of that, some were welcoming the news that 10 SunGard staffers have split off to form a firm, providing more vendor choices rather than fewer.
But the last laugh will belong to SunGard, vowed Doug Bergeron, president of the Chicago-based technology company, a unit of SunGard Data Systems.
Undaunted by his recent setbacks, Bergeron is promising to participate in more acquisitions within the next 60 days.
“We’re not rolling over,” Bergeron said.
Rolfe & Nolan “was not a must-have deal,” Bergeron explained. “We’ve already got critical mass in this business.”
Turnover among staffers doesn’t worry him, either. As at most information-technology businesses these days, “The personnel department is a turnstile,” he said.
Most important, SunGard’s missionary zeal is intact. Bergeron is taking heart from Europe’s rapid transition to computerized trading, among other pro-technology trends that are knocking on the door of the U.S. futures industry.
“The industry is in a funk. We are the agents of change,” Bergeron said. “The status quo, if left to prevail in the futures industry, would lead to its extinction.”
Not on the team: Angering its rival, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange last week refused to join a Chicago Board of Trade-led effort to block regulatory approval of a computerized exchange.
To the Board of Trade, the proposed Cantor Financial Futures Exchange represents an unfair competitive threat–one that imperils the traditional open-outcry method of trading.
But the Merc has a kinship with the Cantor system, according to Board of Trade Chairman Patrick Arbor.
In its Globex after-hours currency operation, the Merc uses market-making practices similar to those contemplated by Cantor.
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That, said Arbor, is the reason Merc Chairman Scott Gordon gave him last week for turning down his request to join in the protest. The Chicago Board Options Exchange, American Stock Exchange and the Minneapolis Grain Exchange, meantime, have formally expressed concern about the Cantor proposal, Arbor said.
“I’m surprised the Merc didn’t join all the other exchanges in protecting the public interest,” Arbor said Friday. “They should, because in this case, (Cantor’s regulatory) submission is seriously flawed”–an assertion Cantor disputes.
Others say the Merc could be giving Cantor a pass because of concern that the Board of Trade’s Chicago Board Brokerage cash-market unit could eventually compete against its Eurodollar contract.
Gordon didn’t respond to requests for comment. A Merc spokeswoman said she could not explain the Merc’s position on Cantor.
On second thought: Pushing hard to promote futures on the Dow Jones industrial average, the Board of Trade has run out of stopwatches that were part of a trading kit being offered free to anyone interested in the Dow contracts. Some 2,000 were given away.
Just one question: What are customers supposed to do with the stopwatches?
They’re supposed to be a reminder that Dow futures are available “virtually around the clock,” an exchange spokesman said. As of Friday, the Board of Trade expanded the hours of its open-outcry session to run from 7:20 a.m. to 3:15 p.m. The contracts are available on the Project A computer trading network afternoons and overnight.
So the stopwatch isn’t intended to dramatize how quickly orders supposedly are being filled in the Dow pit? “Well, you also get quick fills (of orders),” the quick-thinking spokesman responded.