ESpeed, Cantor's Lutnick on Expansion Plans: Commodity Comment
3/17/00 1:13:00 PM
Source: Bloomberg News
Boca Raton, Florida, March 17 (Bloomberg) -- Excerpts from an interview with Howard Lutnick, co-chairman of the Cantor Exchange and chairman of Cantor subsidiary eSpeed Inc., about company plans and Commodity Futures Trading Commission rulings, at the Futures Industry Association meeting:
'The first day of the rest of our life will probably be in the month of April. While (the Cantor Exchange) opened for business, we just didn't have the rules in place. The CFTC is a very fair organization. These things just take time.'
'Electronics are going to win. ... It's cheaper, faster and more fair, and how can that not win? It is a certainty in my view.'
'Change is very hard. To change a current way of doing business by a vote of the members who are doing that business, boy, that is really hard. The right thing is electronic trading. The right thing is lowering the cost and giving direct access and having a less than one-second response time.'
'The Internet is an access point for a broad mass media. There is not a broad mass media of professional traders to trade futures. E*Trade and Ameritrade will provide access to those futures contracts inevitably and eventually. If the people at this conference would wake up and take their own products online they might get there before E*Trade.'
'If someone says they're going to run a futures exchange only over the Internet, what they're doing is they're trying to cut costs. If they're trying to cut costs it's just not going to be a credible threat. We have a global T1 network that hooks up all of the biggest 500 banks and broker-dealers and (futures brokers) in the world.
'Salomon Brothers, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and First Boston, they deserve perfect connectivity because they'll do enough business. They aren't going to do business over the Internet for their billion-dollar transactions.'
'Our opportunities are incredible. The financial markets are huge. We plan to expand into non-financials, into energy and telecom trading, bandwidth trading, chemicals, produce, all basically a replication of this massive infrastructure that could only be afforded to be built based on the largest businesses in the world.
'Fixed income trades something like $500 billion a day. These are vast markets. Because of the huge investment we've made in financial markets, we can leverage and extend and scale that into the financial markets and non-financial markets.' |
