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Strategies & Market Trends : Option Spreads, Credit my Debit -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: OX who wrote (1320)	3/30/2000 10:45:00 PM
From: KFE	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 2317

OX, Maybe there's help on the way. I certainly hope so. U.S. to Settle Litigation With Options Industry Dow Jones Newswires NEW YORK -- The Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission have offered to settle their long-running antitrust suit against the U.S. options industry, according to a person familiar with the matter. Details of the proposed settlement weren't available, but lawyers from the National Association of Securities Dealers' American Stock Exchange, Chicago Board Options Exchange, Pacific Exchange and Philadelphia Stock Exchange met last week in Washington to discuss the government's offer, the person said. A spokesman for the Philadelphia exchange declined to comment, as did the Amex and CBOE. The SEC also declined to comment. The Pacific Exchange and Department of Justice didn't respond to requests for interviews. While it will take far more than one meeting to reach a settlement, it appears an end may be near after more than a year of investigations. The Justice Department has tried to determine if the four options exchanges violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. For years, the exchanges let each other develop exclusive franchises in certain options on major blue-chip stocks without fear of competition. For instance, investors who wanted to trade options on Dell Computer Corp. could only send their orders to the Philadelphia exchange. The listings practice, which options-industry officials referred to as a gentleman's agreement before the start of the federal investigations, ended about eight months ago when the International Securities Exchange, a planned electronic-options exchange, said it would list all single-listed options. The SEC, meanwhile, launched a competing investigation into price fixing. It was concerned that spreads -- the difference between the prices at which dealers buy and sell securities -- were unusually wide in options because the exchanges didn't compete with each other. The spread represents the dealers' profit for filling orders. The SEC has noted that spreads have improved by as much as 40% since the options exchanges decided in August to compete with each other on contracts. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------