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Microcap & Penny Stocks : Tokyo Joe's Cafe / Societe Anonyme/No Pennies -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rock_nj who wrote (90450)	8/24/1999 9:07:00 AM
From: EyeDrMike	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 119973

from the Securities Industry News: Monday, August 23, 1999 Ashton Set for Friday Launch of Trading System on PHLX Mark Hendrickson Ashton Technology Group will begin to roll out the first of its several planned trading products Friday with the phased launch of its volume weighted average price (VWAP) trading system (VTS) on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. The launch on PHLX comes a week after two other key developments at Ashton-its announcement last Thursday that it had raised $20 million in cash through a private placement and an announcement the day before that it had entered an alliance with SunGard Data Systems unit SunGard Institutional Brokerage to market Ashton's VTS to SDS' 200-plus institutional clients on a soft-dollar basis. VTS is a preopening order matching system for the execution of large-sized stock orders at the volume weighted average price. Ashton and PHLX officials have promoted VTS as the first system that enables investors to receive a weighted average price execution on a national securities exchange-one that offers anonymity and no market impact. VWAP trading currently accounts for about 8 percent of all listed trading volume, said Fredric Rittereiser, Ashton's chairman. "We think VWAP trading will go as high as 15 percent of the market," said Rittereiser. He expects his VTS system to average "10 million shares a day for the first year-5 million crossing." The Securities and Exchange Commission this spring approved PHLX's application to operate Ashton's VTS on a one-year pilot basis, with the securities eligible for matching through VTS limited to the 300 most highly liquid and capitalized stocks. VTS will be phased in over three stages in the next three months, beginning Friday with 20 actively traded securities, including IBM, America Online and General Electric, Rittereiser said. The first phase, a limited live test, will last until the end of September and involve "15 to 30 smaller players-specialists and smaller broker-dealers," he said. The second phase, from the end of September until the end of October, will add an additional 40 to 50 "bigger players that have agreed to come on." The third phase, from the end of October to the end of November, "will encompass both the biggest broker-dealers, who aggregate orders from multiple places, and very big institutions, who will be basically locked into us" through computer interfaces. Ashton officials view the private placement of Series F Convertible Preferred stock through a sale to an investment fund managed by Rose Glen Capital Management LP as "a very big deal for us." With the $20 million, Ashton now has about $30 million in cash on hand. "The additional funds will enable us to accelerate development of our trading systems, which we anticipate will form the technical backbone of NextExchange as well as our transactional Web site, EMC, which will be targeted at midsize financial institutions seeking to electronically distribute products and services," said Arthur Bacci, Ashton's president and CFO. Rittereiser said Ashton would file to register NextExchange with the SEC as a for-profit alternative trading system stock exchange in a little more than six months, and it likely will go live within 18 months. The Web site should be operational by the third quarter of next year, he added. The alliance with SunGard was nine months in the making. "By offering Ashton's VWAP we continue to enhance the wide range of investment products and services we offer to clients," allowing them to pay for the soft-dollarable VTS through brokerage commissions, said Jeanne Victore Crisci, SGIB president.