"This achievement is the result of a tremendous amount of time and effort from the CNQ team, our participating dealers and their supporting systems vendors. Through all of the months of industry tests and the gradual implementation of new stocks as dealer and vendor systems demonstrated their readiness, we never lost sight of the goal: to deliver a better, faster and cheaper trading experience for our customers," says Richard Carleton, Vice-President of Corporate Development for CNQ.
"Even though we are still at an early stage, each day we are delivering more than half a million new, competitively priced, orders to the Canadian markets resulting in narrower bid/ask spreads and greater liquidity for investors."
Today, Pure Trading has 77 participating dealers, representing more than 97% of the daily equity trading volume in Canada. With its initial launch of trading services for 3 stocks on September 14, 2007, Pure Trading became the first competitive fully electronic equity auction market service to ever launch in Canada.
It has changed the landscape of the Canadian capital markets to one that is far more competitive domestically, as well as more attractive to global investors looking to invest in Canadian-listed stocks.

"We're continuing to see a great deal of international dealer and service provider interest in connecting to Pure Trading for their clients," says Ian Bandeen, Vice-Chairman and CEO. "Winning more order flow from these sources will be a key focus of our efforts in the coming months."

Pure Trading aims to provide a more effective and cost efficient alternative for the trading of Canadian equity securities. It is the second major initiative of CNQ, which launched the first new Canadian stock exchange in over 70 years in 2003, and which continues to steadily add to its complement of listed companies, participating dealers and trading volumes.