The keyword in this whole story is fungibility. Fungible contracts can be bought on one exchange and sold on another. Relevant matter for TOM.
On the very same day the new market maker licences at Euronext are auctioned. The primary market maker (pmm), competitive market maker (cmm) and extra competitive market maker (cmx) roles are divided again among the trading firms. Anyone can apply for cmm, but for more bandwidth the pmm roles are scarce.
Here’s the full sheet (pdf). A few play offs where firms are competing for the same PMM spot :
Ahold : Caerus, IMC, Optiver, 323
Aperam : Caerus, Nino
CSM : Caerus, 323 Trading
Fugro : Nino, 323 Trading
KPN : Caerus, 323 Trading
Randstad : Nino, 323 Trading
SBM Offshore : Nino, Leopark
Furthermore the overview suggests Caerus and IMC will battle for a cmm role in Unibail. This certainly can’t be true – there are enough vacant places in the Unibail crowd. Euronext is never very sharp on this kind of details. Speaking of vacant places. All Options is (still) the lonely trader in Unit 4, Mediq and from next week on also in the midcap index options AMX. IMC left the midcap options. Apparently these AMX options have failed to take off, unfortunately.
With lots of retail flow traded on TOM, the noble art of market making on Euronext is slowly losing importance. Anyway, this TOM should stop with using the words “search engine” in their communication (Dutch story, NRC). They don’t search at all – but keep everything on their own exchange as long as the price on Euronext isn’t better. TOM is completely ignoring the Dutch options on Eurex. Comparing prices, but not very good at it.
Quote 500
Next week the Dutch rich list will be published again. Sources say there will be more traders in the list than ever. Enough to write about next week.