Korea is the new beach head in the growing war between the world's established stock exchanges and the new, technology-savvy electronic communication networks ECNs. Island ECN went on the offensive last week with the announcement that it had moved into the Korean securities market through a joint venture with Uclick, a financial portal and technology provider.
ECNs are a form of alternate trading systems that facilitate off-market auction matching of customers' buy and sell orders. Like most of the exchanges in the Asia-Pacific region, ECNs capture order flow and match prices electronically. But they generally have much lower operating costs than traditional exchanges and can avoid a lot of the...
