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MarketAxess, an electronic bond-trading platform for the U.S. and Europe, has added Credit Suisse to its high-yield trading platform, say MarketAxess officials. With Credit Suisse, there are 18 liquidity providers on the MarketAxess high-yield system. ABN Amro and Jefferies and Co. have also agreed to join the current high-yield dealer group, which includes Banc of America Securities, Barclays, Bear Stearns, BNP Paribas, Citigroup Global Markets, Deutsche Bank Securities, FTN Financial, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, RBS Greenwich, UBS and Wachovia Securities.

Lehman Brothers last week acquired a minority stake in Bats Trading, which operates the Bats ECN, for an undisclosed sum, say bank and Bats officials. Michael Bleich, head of liquidity strategy at Lehman Brothers, says that Bats is an innovator in the execution platform space. Bats chairman and CEO David Cummings says he established Bats "to address the increasingly sophisticated needs of the trading community" and hopes the Lehman deal "sets the stage for partnerships with other firms in the future." In June, Bats stopped displaying its quotes on the Nasdaq Stock Market’s SuperMontage in favor of displaying them via the National Stock Exchange (NSX). Bats formally launched its ECN in February after it received approval from NASD this past January (DWT, Feb. 6).

Cantor Fitzgerald is using technology from Kx Systems to handle historical data analysis and immediate querying of streaming market data, confirm Cantor and Kx officials. The system is based on Kx’s kdb+ database and the "q" programming language and Cantor traders will use the solution to integrate their risk management and trading strategies. They can track their portfolio risk and trades in real time, which enables them to gauge the momentum of price moves. "We’ve gone beyond simply knowing the risk to being able to act on it in the moment," says Jacob Loveless, senior vice president at Cantor. The integration has been in the works since November 2005 when programmers wrote a back-testing program in two days and slowly added on architecture until last week’s launch.

Penson Financial Services Canada, a Penson Worldwide subsidiary, has inked a deal with a Canadian online broker, TradeFreedom, to extend its introducing/carrying broker agreement until 2009, say vendor and broker officials. It will cover all clearing and back office services. Recently, the Canadian subsidiary of Penson, which focuses on technology securities services, upgraded its foreign exchange platform (DWT, Aug. 21).

GemStone Systems is readying an update of its GemFire product, dubbed version 5.0. The software features increased role-based data distribution, enhanced data portioning model, loosely coupled distributed systems, and advanced management for slow and unresponsive applications. "SOA and grid computing projects frequently present dramatic data management challenges, requiring reliable access and delivery of data among disparate applications with minimum latency," says Shankar Iyer, executive vice president of marketing and strategy at GemStone. New features and improved functions consist of managing data persistence and distribution across hundreds to thousands of nodes, say Gemstone officials. The upgrade will be available next month and a preview version is available on the company’s Web site.

Twisted Pair Solutions, a Seattle-based software company that builds IP-based communications software, is working with BT Trading Systems to embed Twisted Pair’s Wave software in BT’s ITS trading turret solutions. The new product will be called ITS Communicator, say officials for Twisted Pair. The Wave software enables users to communicate via hoot and holler as well as intercom from the trading floor, or while traveling or working remotely, in real time over a firm’s IP network.

Wall Street Systems (WSS) has integrated Markit’s credit default swap and corporate bond price data with Markit’s reference entity database (RED). The effort will result in a credit trading and risk management solution available to clients of WSS and Markit, according to both companies. Markit provides pricing, reference data, portfolio valuations and over-the-counter derivatives trade processing for the global financial and commodities markets. Delivering Markit data via the WSS platform will provide "a comprehensive view of complete and accessible data," says Larry Ng, managing director of product and marketing at WSS. The integrated access to data within mission-critical systems is intended to support key trading, risk and operational processes, says Mark Hunt, director of product development at Markit.