Nasdaq, NumeriX, ConvergEx

Nasdaq and Reuters last week shut the Independent Research Network, a joint venture established two years ago to initiate research coverage of under-reported companies, after poor uptake for the service. According to a Nasdaq spokesperson, "While we continue to believe in the concept of brokered research, and received a good reputation for our model, we have decided to discontinue IRN due to the fact that the adoption rate was slower than anticipated." Officials did not return calls seeking information on how many companies used the service. A Reuters spokesperson says any Reuters staff will be reassigned to other roles at the vendor.

Pricing and analytics vendor NumeriX has added support for a range of new complex instruments to version 6.1 of its pricing software. The new release includes basket models for forward and backward pricing, a local-intensity credit basket model for pricing tranche options, cross-currency Libor Market Model pricing, a backward-pricing model for interest rate and equity derivatives, and a more stable backward-lattice model.

Agency broker and technology provider BNY ConvergEx has integrated Thomson Financial's consolidated datafeed into its Eze Castle OMS to provide clients with data including time-series index and constituent level data, pricing and derived data across multiple asset classes, including equities, fixed income, foreign exchange and money markets.

Nasdaq last week added a new Pre-Trade Market Impact Cost Estimator product to its Nasdaq DataStore, which allows traders and investors to buy data and tools via the Internet. The tool is designed to improve pre-trade analysis and manage transaction costs, using data from Nasdaq ModelView to determine and minimize market impact, and compare post-trade impact.

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange last week renewed its contract with Dow Jones Indexes to exclusively list futures contracts and options on futures contracts based on the Dow Jones Industrial Average and other DJ indexes previously listed on the Chicago Board of Trade (now part of CME Group), and in January, CME will begin trading Dow Jones Index-related products on its Globex electronic trading platform, alongside CME's existing benchmark equity indexes. Dow Jones—along with Standard & Poor's and the Chicago Board Options Exchange—is suing the International Securities Exchange to prevent them from trading contracts on indexes licensed exclusively to CBOE.

Fitch Ratings has launched a tool to compare data on more than 15,000 private and public banks, including more than 2,400 assigned credit ratings by Fitch. The Peer Analysis Tool, which contains more than 10 years of historical data, covers banks from 200 countries—with reporting in euros, US dollars, Japanese yen and sterling—provides more than 90 data items and ratios for each bank.

Barchart.com, a Chicago-based provider of data and analytics for the futures, equity and foreign exchange markets, last week announced that it completed the acquisition of Futuresboard.com, an online community for futures traders to provide market commentary and features such as audio reports. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Nordic exchange operator and technology provider OMX will halve trade reporting fees on Nov. 1 to coincide with the implementation of MiFID. OMX already halved reporting fees in April.