BETWEEN THE LINES

Lehman Brothers has signed an agreement with Plexus Group to enhance its equity trading system by offering clients value-added service. First up: Lehman will offer buy-side clients the Broker Edge Monitor, which provides execution data and ranks brokers on the quality of execution. The agreement also includes Pre/Post Trade Analysis, which offers money managers and plan sponsors independent data on the costs of rebalancing or liquidating portfolios. The companies may also develop proprietary trading products and system enhancements to enable Lehman to offer clients a way to monitor and evaluate active trading.

Multex.com has agreed to acquire Market Guide. The transaction is structured as a merger of a newly formed subsidiary with and into Market Guide, with Market Guide shareholders receiving about 5.6 million shares of Multex.com stock. Following the completion of the acquisition, Market Guide expects to make Multex.com's investment research and earnings estimates available through its Website as well as through its 100-plus Internet distribution partners. Multex.com will use the move to leverage Market Guide's Internet distribution network, content and brand. Multex.com will also be able to increase the quantity and scope of its proprietary financial content analysis. Multex.com plans to integrate Market Guide's proprietary financial databases into all its Internet research services. The acquisition is scheduled to close within 120 days. Market Guide will retain its key management and be operated as a wholly owned subsidiary of Multex.com. Market Guide's president and CEO Homi Byr amji will remain in that role and join Multex .com's board of directors.

Trading Edge has appointed Kenneth Austin senior vice president of emerging markets to develop an emerging market service for institutional investors. The Emerging Market Debt Trading service will go live by year-end. "We are seeing clients already," says Trading Edge president and COO Brad Levie. The service will allow investors to trade international issues via the Internet. Austin will build the sales, marketing and support functions of the new service. He was previously a managing director of Banc Boston Securities, where he headed the Emerging Markets Sales Desk. Trading Edge's next service will be for convertibles and is also due out by the end of this year. According to Levie, several market makers have already ex pressed interest. Trading Edge also offers the BondLink service for high-yield bond trading.

Wilco International added an order routing, management and execution module to its Gloss trading and settlement system. The new modules can be used as part of Gloss or with third-party systems. The module automates all steps of order management, including order capture, grouping, routing, execution, matching and allocation. The first client: Banque Generale du Luxembourg, which is taking it for its Luxembourg headquarters to handle orders for international equities and fixed income trades.

The Capital Markets Company (CMC) just got more capital. The consultancy (home to Joe Anastasio, among others) recently completed a second round of financing from domestic and international investors, totaling $32 million. CMC was founded less than a year ago and now has more than 250 employees and offices in New York, London, Paris and Frankfurt. CMC specializes in strategic consulting, managing complex projects and design and implementing and integrating IT systems. The company offers solutions for straight through processing, risk management, clearing, settlement and custody. It also consults on extended trading hours, cross-border trading, electronic IPOs and real-time matching.

Oracle and Financial Technologies International (FTI) have teamed up to introduce The Box. This solution allows an institution to integrate its general ledger with its financial transaction activities. It can also produce real-time consolidated positions, balances and aggregated counterparty exposures by product, currency and other criteria and then deliver the data to customers via the Internet or circulate it internally via an intranet. Institutions can also map transactional data directly into a transactional subledger--The Box--thus preventing the usual data overload that often de grades the traditional general ledger's performance.

Easdaq is planning to create a low-cost platform for trading international growth and technology stocks in Europe. Easdaq has selected Tibco to provide the technology platform, based on TIBEx change, which will form the core of a new quote-driven trading system. Tibco will also facilities manage and run the core system on Easdaq's behalf. MCI World Com is supplying the new backbone network to underpin electronic trading for Easdaq members. The new strategy capitalizes on Easdaq's pan-European market infrastructure, which includes a single trading platform and a seamless link to clearing and settlement with Euroclear and Cedelbank. In addition, Easdaq will introduce new dual trading facilities for growth and technology stocks already listed on other regulated markets in the US, Israel and Europe as well as traditional Easdaq IPOs and secondary offerings, within a regulated market environment.

In a speech last week at the National Press Club, Frank Zarb, chairman and CEO of NASD and Nasdaq-Amex, urged the industry--especially ECNs--to work together to prepare for extended hours trading, which he said will be a reality. He added that to prepare, NASD leadership also plan to participate in the SEC's June 30 meeting on extended hours trading and work with small broker/dealers to ease the impact on their business. Other items of interest: Zarb proposed an initial public offering for Nasdaq and suggested that the NASD wants to trade bond futures electronically.

Blitz Systems has introduced a server-based solution for authoring, editing and distributing research documents through a thin-client model. The system, dubbed Research Publisher TC, is designed for implementation in a secure intranet/extranet environment and can be accessed from any computer with Internet access and a Web browser. Access and authorization levels, controlled by secure user login, can be extended to remote authors.

Cantor Fitzgerald has filed a patent infringement lawsuit in Federal District Court in Delaware against Liberty Brokerage Investment Corp. and Liberty Brokerage. Cantor maintains that Liberty infringed upon the technology for Interactive Matching, for which Cantor was awarded a US patent.

A survey conducted by the Securities Industry Association indicates that, in spite of alarmists', well, alarm, most investors expect the transition into the new millenium to be "business as usual" for stock markets and brokerages. According to the survey, 88 percent of respondents expressed their confidence in the capital markets' and brokerage firms' ability to diffuse potential problems successfully. Very few claimed that they would take out money from the stock market; only about two percent had already done so. Of those who intend to follow suit, it is expected that most, in fact, will not.