Press

On Monday, August 23, 1999, Eurex, the German-Swiss derivatives market, successfully introduced the first step in its new Release 3.0. This means that the third Eurex release has now also been launched right on schedule. After the last joint simulations with participants over the weekend, active trading on the newly installed software was operative on Monday for the first time. About 370 participants from 16 countries implemented the new software roll-out together with Eurex. This was reported by the world's largest derivatives market in Frankfurt on Tuesday.

Eurex Executive Board member Jürg Spillmann said: "The world's biggest roll-out in the history of electronic trading only went so smoothly because of the excellent cooperation between participants, vendors, Deutsche Börse Systems and Eurex."

The latest version of the Eurex system is being introduced in several steps. In the second step, on September 6, the main change will be a new software architecture with an open interface as well as a modern graphical user interface.

In a third step, on September 14, Eurex is introducing a pro-rata matching algorithm for trading in its money market futures. This allocation algorithm is based exclusively on price priority and will significantly increase the probability of execution for orders with a low time priority. Trading in Euribor products, which is characterized by lower intra-day volatility by comparison to other exchange-traded derivatives, will be optimized further due to efficient allocation. The pro-rata algorithm replaces the matching principle based on price/time priority that has been applicable to the one-month and three-month Euribor futures to date.