US SSFs learning to crawl

Single stock futures exchanges reached their first anniversary last Saturday with modest success.

Executives from OneChicago and NQLX told FO Week that the first year had been difficult. The securities futures market, that was strongly hyped by industry and media prior to launch on 8 November 2002, struggled with a series of industry and market obstacles. Both exchanges faced numerous barriers including an ongoing bear market in stocks and layoffs at major Wall Street firms which limited resources for single stock futures. Each exchange also launched in the final quarter last year,...