SWX And Private Investors Get Closer Together - Starting October 18, Also Small Orders Can Be Entered With A Price Limit On The SWX Swiss Exchange.

Good news for private investors. As of October 18, the same conditions will apply for small trades as they do for the orders of large institutional investors. Up until now, shares were traded on SWX only in what are known as round lots. Depending on the price of the stock, a prescribed minimum number of shares constituted an official round lot. The tradability of smaller-sized tickets, so-called fractional orders or odd lots, at times was impeded to a certain extent. Specifically, no odd lots could be entered with a price limit, rather only at the market. Those tickets were either bunched together into round lots by the electronic trading system and then executed or they were matched against each other at the reference price of the given stock. Already last February, SWX lowered the minimum order size on bonds to their smallest deliverable quantity. Once this change also takes effect for stocks on October 18, warrants will be the only securities still traded in round lots on SWX. By adopting this trading norm, SWX makes entree to the securities markets even easier for private investors. With the elimination of round lots, SWX is responding to the need among investors to also be able to trade in quantities that are smaller than those dealt in by the big players. The Exchange and private investors started coming closer together back in the mid-90s when electronic trading was introduced. In 1996, the SWX Swiss Exchange was the first to offer fully automated securities dealing. In so doing, SWX also made it possible to disseminate real-time information on market prices and trading volume. At present, 16 vendors and 32 value-added resellers provide 54,000 customers with tick-by-tick securities prices. And those providers are not just the traditional financial information systems such as Telekurs. Real-time SWX market data is also sold via the Internet. The number of users taking advantage of this channel is growing exponentially: In March of this year, there were already 4500. By September, a total of more than 23,000 Internet users were accessing information live on the Exchange. Other service providers have turned this Internet capability into a virtual home trading desk for private investors: CS (with youtrade), ZKB, BCV, Migrosbank, Coopbank, Märki Baumann, Oxford Partners and lately also UBS (with Tradepac) and Schmidt Bank are accepting client orders via the Internet and automatically routing them to SWX. In September, roughly 65,000 orders were executed on SWX from these channels, an amount representing approximately 10% of all transactions done on the Exchange. The average order size of this group of investors is around 7000 francs. For the daily use of private investors, SWX today truly is an Internet exchange.