This is the eighth major release of the year for optionsXpress and it contains more than 500 unique upgrades to its award winning investing platform. Highlights within the release include the following:

Streaming Option Chains:

Timing is everything in today's volatile market. In this site release, optionsXpress has taken its popular Option Chains to the next level by offering streaming, real time price updates inside a standard web browser. Customers will now have the most up-to-the-moment data for Bid, Ask and Volume, giving them the ability to make real-time trade decisions and stay on the cutting edge of the market.

New Order Types:

Customers can further stretch their strategic muscles with new trade variations now available on Xspreads and Multi-Leg trade pages, including:

* Broken-Wing Butterflies - Construct butterflies with non-standard ratios such as 1:2:2 and 1:3:1.
* Unbalanced Butterflies - Set up butterflies with asymmetric (uneven) strike price differentials.
* Ratio Spreads - Enjoy additional free-form spreading options.

Trading Patterns Enhancement:

Retail traders are increasingly investing in a wider variety of investment products. To make finding opportunities across the different products even easier, optionsXpress has now expanded its widely used Trading Patterns(c) tool to include futures contracts. This tool's interactive pattern diagram identifies new trading opportunities in securities, options or futures contracts based on the views of like-minded investors.

Online Shareholder Tools:

In service related enhancements, optionsXpress has teamed up with Inveshare(c) to provide customers with one-stop online access to shareholder-related services. Most other platforms force shareholders to go to dedicated outside sites to gain prospectus delivery or to cast proxy votes. This service is now fully integrated within the optionsXpress platform and allows a customer to execute these tasks without ever leaving their optionsXpress account.

"We continue to see the level of sophistication of retail investors increase as well as their ability to react more quickly to changing market conditions," says David Fisher, Chief Executive Officer of optionsXpress Holdings, Inc. "The improvements that we are announcing today are tailored specifically to meet this more active approach of our investors and to do so with an even higher level of service and with more intuitive and powerful tools."