Nasdaq OMX Extends SMARTS to Energy

The SMARTS Surveillance for Energy module enables producers, marketers and traditional financial services firms to proactively monitor trading across both physical and financial energy markets through its ability to detect suspicious trading behaviors, document all potential instances of abuse, and protect against market manipulation.

Alerting capabilities include price manipulation scenarios, banging the close or open, physical versus financial-related index manipulation, uneconomic trading, use of market power at discrete time intervals or contract markets, order book abuse such as spoofing, layering, excessive corrections, quote stuffing, insider trading, front-running, collusion and parking trades.

"As regulators such as the CFTC, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and Agency for the Cooperation of European Regulators (ACER) increase their focus on improving integrity and transparency in the energy markets through global initiatives including the Regulation on Wholesale Energy Market Integrity and Transparency (REMIT), Dodd-Frank and Order 670, market participants are monitoring proactively their energy trading activity," says Rob Lang, vice president and head of SMARTS. "In developing this module, we are proud to collaborate with both our customers and expanding beyond that community to include those producing energy or that trade energy assets for hedging purposes, and are focusing much more attention on their surveillance practices both domestically and internationally."