Boston Stock Exchange Closing Electronic Stock Exchange

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Apr 6, 6:16PM EDT · Published Sep 5, 9:21AM EDT

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The Boston Stock Exchange (The "BSE") has announced that it has discontinued the operations of the Boston Equities Exchange ("BeX"), whch is the exchange’s electronic stock exchange launched in August 2005. The BSE claims that it will continue to be active in the marketplace and will support its remaining ventures including the regulation of the Boston Options Exchange (BOX). BeX is one of several ventures launched by the BSE over the past three years.

While this venture struggled to gain market share in large part due to the overall strength of market incumbents, the BSE claims that the other ventures have continued to be successful. The BSE says that LeveL, its dark-book alternative trading system, which was originally incubated by the BSE, is experiencing dramatic growth and plans to expand its operations.

“We are disappointed that BeX was not able to become competitive in today’s marketplace and perform as well as other ventures of the Boston Stock Exchange, but we want to emphasize that the BSE remains a committed member of the National Market System,” said Boston Stock Exchange Chairman and CEO, Michael Curran.

The Boston Stock Exchange and the various ventures have a total of approximately 100 employees and this cessation will affect approximately forty employees: some will be reassigned to other ventures, some will remain on through the transition and those whose positions were eliminated will receive severance packages.

As the exchange wars heat up and as the competition gets more fierce, these regional players have to focus on their strengths rather than bringing on wider areas for a broader scope where they are outgunned from day one. Speaking of which, where is that darned American Stock Exchange IPO?

Jon C. Ogg
September 5, 2007

Jon Ogg can be reached at [email protected]; he produces the Special Situation Investing Newsletter and he does not own securities in the companies he covers.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.