Ballista introduces electronic equity options liquidity pool

The company will offer demos of the new platform at the 26th Annual Options Industry Conference, being held May 1-3 in Las Vegas (Booth B-120).

Ballista, which has successfully completed multiple proof-of-concept trades, expects to launch as early as May 2008 via a private broker/dealer, pending regulatory approval.

"The growth of the options industry has been nothing short of phenomenal," said Robert Newhouse, CEO of Ballista. "The proliferation of option strategy utilization, the introduction of new options exchanges and changes to regulations have resulted in a highly fragmented market. We believe Ballista's ability to aggregate public and non-public liquidity via a single electronic platform built for block trades and delta-neutral/complex transactions, will significantly enhance liquidity sourcing efforts throughout the options community."

The Ballista platform offers traders searching for liquidity the ability to communicate directly with counterparties, allowing for direct and instantaneous access to one another. Ballista's strength rests in its ability to aggregate both "public" liquidity found on exchanges and "non-public" liquidity, the passive liquidity offered by market-makers, banks and hedge funds.

Also unique to Ballista is a proprietary negotiation process between trade "initiators" and "contras" that follows Ballista's auction phase. During this post-auction process, the initiator and best-price contra are placed into a private facility for continued anonymous negotiation of both price and size parameters.

Ballista seeks to deliver the following value propositions to institutional options traders:

1. Liquidity Aggregation—Offers simultaneous access to both public markets and passive liquidity.
2. Superior Efficiency—Provides direct electronic initiator/contra communication, eliminating the need for IM and phone communications.
3. Multiple Strategies—Supports block trades, delta-neutral transactions, spreads and multi-leg compleex orders.
4. Specialty Order Types—Enables both "Auction" orders with complete exclusivity or "Hidden" orders that conceal the initiator's intent.
5. Complete Anonymity—Hides user identity from all counterparties.
6. Vetted Participants—Ensures a trading community of qualified Buy-Side initiators and Sell-Side liquidity providers that organically trade in large block sizes.