Brokers And Clients Come To Grips With New Toys For The Boys

The Age

Tuesday November 29, 2005

By ANNELI KNIGHT, SYDNEY

IT WAS a case of flying blind and playing with new toys on the sharemarket yesterday, as brokers had their first day trading without broker identification information.

In the biggest change to the sharemarket since trading went electronic more than a decade ago, brokers and their clients grappled with the new system.

In a first for the market, firms could choose how much information they would reveal about their trading patterns to competitors and clients through their IRESS trading screens. This is the first time clients have been able to view any trading information directly. But there was not a wide uptake of this option. Only Merrill Lynch, Macquarie Bank, CommSec and UBS made their market share data available, with a 10-minute delay.

Credit Suisse First Boston started by offering detailed information about buy and sell price and volume traded on each stock, but reduced this to market share only by early afternoon. Goldman Sachs JBWere's Melbourne head of sales trading, Patrick Crabb, said that while no one expected any disasters, there was definitely a different feel on the trading desks.

"The market still functioned - there was just a large chunk of information that wasn't available," he said. "The transparency and the level of market intelligence was materially lower.

In two weeks brokers will have further functions available to them through their IRESS screens to control who has access to the information they choose to reveal about their trading activity.

Market puts on spurt BUSINESS 4