Mondo Visione Worldwide Financial Markets Intelligence

FTSE Mondo Visione Exchanges Index:

The Philadelphia Stock Exchange To Begin Trading Options On The Europe Sector Index (XEX<SUP>sm</SUP>) On Monday, October 20

Date 16/10/2003

The Philadelphia Stock Exchange announced today that it will begin trading options on the Europe Sector Index (XEXSM) on Monday, October 20.

XEXSM is a capitalization-weighted index composed of 32 companies domiciled in eight countries on the European continent and the British Isles. It was designed to effectively represent the most highly capitalized and liquid “blue chip” European companies. All of the issues comprising the XEX are NYSE or NASDAQ listed with option classes actively traded on the U.S. options exchanges.

XEX exhibits a correlation in excess of 90% to the Dow Jones Euro STOXXSM 50, one of the most widely followed indexes of blue-chip European companies. With XEX, U.S. investors can participate in the movements of these types of companies with the ease of a cash-settled options contract.

Industry groups represented in the index include oil and gas, cellular communications, pharmaceuticals, retail manufacturing, software and banking.

The new index was allocated to Timber Hill LLC. Timber Hill LLC is the U.S. broker-dealer subsidiary of Interactive Brokers Group LLC (IBG), which has various subsidiaries that conduct equity and derivatives market making on more than 40 exchanges and market centers in 17 countries globally.

Time after time, the PHLX has introduced products ahead of investor need, having both recognized untapped market segments and anticipated investor need for quality investment and hedging instruments. The roster of such products is long: the PHLX Oil Service SectorSM (OSXSM); the PHLX Defense SectorSM (DFXSM); the PHLX Gold/Silver SectorSM (XAUSM); the PHLX Housing SectorSM (HGXSM); and the PHLX Semiconductor SectorSM (SOXSM) to name a few.

To view the components of the XEXSM, please visit www.phlx.com.

The Philadelphia Stock Exchange (PHLX) was founded in 1790. The PHLX trades more than 2,000 stocks, 1,000 listed equity options, 14 sectors index options and currency pairs. For more information about the PHLX and its products, visit www.phlx.com.