Euronext.liffe Highlights The Recent Success Of Universal Stock Futures: Year-To-Date Volumes Up 116%

Euronext.liffe, the international derivatives business of Euronext, today highlighted the recent success of its Universal Stock Futures (USFs) portfolio, in particular the contracts based on German, French and Dutch stocks. Key USF highlights:

• New all-time monthly record for all USFs: 903,568 contracts traded in April, up 148% year-on-year
• Year-to-date, January to end April 2003 volume in all USFs: 2 million, up 116% for the same period last year
• Open Interest for all USFs as of 30 April 2003 - 722,084 contracts (a new all time record)
• German USFs: traded 310,117 contracts year-to-date, up 96% on same period last year
• French USFs: traded 151,085 contracts year-to-date, up 251% on same period last year
• Dutch USFs: traded 593,245 contracts year-to-date, up 816% on same period last year

Fraser Cowie, Executive Director of Marketing at Euronext.liffe said: "Given that Universal Stock Futures are still a relatively young product, they are now trading at a level only achieved by equity options after ten years of trading. Recently we have seen the emergence of new players in the market. As well as new participants in the German, French and Dutch markets, hedge funds are seizing the opportunity to trade Global blue chip stocks in a cheap, easy and efficient manner by using Universal Stock Futures."

Trading takes place on a single exchange, under a single regulatory regime and on a single electronic platform - LIFFE CONNECT®. USF investors can profit from positive or negative price movements of blue chip global equities without the transaction costs associated with dealing in the underlying shares and without having to deal with the different rules and tax obligations of different countries. As a result, cross-border settlement costs are slashed.

Max Butti, Product Manager for USFs, gives an example of how USFs can be used: "USFs are a very powerful hedging and asset allocation tool. They allow investors to reallocate entire portions of portfolio without disturbing the underlying make-up. For a portfolio benchmarked against the FTSEurofirst 100 a portfolio manager could use USFs to hedge the single components. He doesn't want to sell them, as in the current environment, most of the time it would mean crystallising a loss. So he can use USFs to hedge the companies he thinks will underperform and perhaps increase exposure to the ones he thinks will do well. Thus he is optimising his portfolio performance without actually selling any of it and realising losses."

USFs offer a cheap and efficient alternative to direct cash investing. By allowing investors to gain leveraged exposure to selected stocks for a fraction of the price of direct investment, they are ideal for hedging purposes, and also for portfolio structuring when direct transactions might not be possible for cost or tax reasons.