NASDAQ OMX Helsinki, part of the NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:NDAQ) today starts trading a portfolio of new certificates issued by Nordea, including bull and bear certificates on the NASDAQ-100 index.

March 10, 2010 – NYSE Euronext (NYX) today announced trading volumes for its global derivatives and cash equities exchanges for February 2010^[1].   Derivatives trading volumes in February 2010 recorded strong year-over-year growth, with European derivatives volumes increasing 44.2% and U.S. options trading volumes increasing 56.4%.  Cash equities trading volumes were mixed in February 2010, with European cash transactions increasing 9.1% and U.S. cash equities trading volumes declining 35.7% from prior year elevated levels.  Both European and U.S. cash trading volumes, however, remain above fourth quarter 2009 levels.

Dubai Financial Market (DFM) announces that the introduction of three decimal Tick Size system on securities with a market value below AED 1, which was due on Thursday, March 11th 2010 will be postponed until further notice, in response to brokers' request.

FFFS 2009:1

There are hundreds of stock market and economic indicators for you to watch.

Which ones are the most important?

The Treasury bond yield curve sounds mind-numbing complex. But, it is one of those indicators that you should pay attention to.

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Treasury Bond Yield Curve – What Does That Mean? originally appeared on About.com Stocks on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 01:16:05.

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Bonds should be a part of every investor's portfolio. Bonds provide a balance to the volatility of stocks.

However they are sometimes confusing and difficult to understand.

This collection of articles will get you started on the right road to success with bonds.

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Bond Information Center originally appeared on About.com Stocks on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at 20:19:04.

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When the market and the economy are challenging your sense of direction, it's easy to look for the types of returns that were available to stock investors not many years ago. The problem is that unknowns about the stock market and economy make it difficult to find good returns for your money.

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Don't Let Risky Investments Tempt You originally appeared on About.com Stocks on Monday, March 8th, 2010 at 01:50:52.

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When times are tough, touch stock investors avoid fees or, at least, keep them to a minimum.

It is seldom a good idea to pay high fees for the privilege of investing.

However, when the market is swimming near the bottom of the pond, high fees can make staying above water a real challenge.

Keep a Tight Watch on Fees originally appeared on About.com Stocks on Thursday, March 4th, 2010 at 09:00:19.

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The stock market really doesn't exist.

You can't go to a physical location and see the stock market.

You can see parts of the stock market at the major exchanges - but not the Nasdaq, which is simply a vast computer network.

The collective known as the stock market is a number of companies and individuals.

They have one common purpose and goal: to make money.

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The Stock Market Really Doesn’t Exist originally appeared on About.com Stocks on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 at 01:06:09.

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On Friday I joined fellow blogger Mark Thoma (and a good many other economists) at a very interesting conference on financial markets held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Here I share some ideas I expressed at the conference about the directions I feel this research ought to go.

The theme of the conference, and indeed the topic of a great number of academic papers now being written, is to try to describe what happens when capital markets have trouble efficiently bringing borrowers and lenders together. The motivation for this interest is the correct observation that interbank and other key lending froze up in the fall of 2008, with devastating consequences for the world economy. The objection that I have to many of these papers is that they focus too much on the effects of these disruptions and not enough on the causes. Many models take the view that credit markets were functioning more or less normally up until the fall of 2008, with the object of study taken to be understanding the consequences of how financial disruptions in 2008:Q4 were propagated to the rest of the economy.

One hundred times the level of home mortgage debt (taken from Flow of Funds, Table B100, row 33) divided by nominal GDP (taken from Bureau of Economic Analysis, Table 1.1.5).

Taken literally, this view would imply that the huge run-up in debt over the last decade was largely benign, and that the core problem is that banks stopped lending in 2008. If that's your perspective, then it's very good news that the rapid growth of debt didn't end just because banks stopped lending.

Federal debt taken from Flow of Funds, Table L106, row 18. Central bank liabilities taken from Flow of Funds, Table L108, row 26.

My view is that the gross deterioration of underwriting standards suggests that it was the run-up in mortgage debt between 2001 and 2007, and not the failure of mortgage debt to expand further in 2008, that indicates a pathology in credit markets.

Here's another variable that I think played an important role in what we've observed. Robert Shiller's data imply that real home prices in the United States were remarkably stable for over a century. They began an unprecedented climb in the last decade, only to reverse course in equally dramatic fashion in 2006. One of the papers from the conference on which I was asked to comment took the perspective that credit markets were functioning essentially normally in 2008:Q3, with the goal of the research being to quantify the consequences of the disruptions that occurred in 2008:Q4. But surely those disruptions had a great deal to do with the decline in house prices that had been underway for several years at that point, and just as surely that decline in house prices had a great deal to do with the run-up in house prices that preceded the bust.

Shiller's real home price index, 1890-2009. Source: Irrational Exuberance, Princeton, 2005, by Robert Shiller.

I presume that everyone would agree that the dislocations of 2008:Q4 did not arise in a vacuum. But some might nevertheless defend modeling those disruptions as exogenous events, if the primary purpose is to try to understand how those events affected the rest of the economy. However, I worry that this is more than just a detail of what one chooses to model, but has the danger of becoming a prevailing paradigm of some in policy circles, who may interpret the core problem as the financial events in the fall of 2008, rather than viewing the core problem as the conditions that precipitated those financial events.

Understanding those precipitating conditions strikes me as a higher priority for this kind of research. Is our goal to know how policy should respond to these disruptions, or how to prevent them in the first place? In terms of the narrow objective of evaluating Federal Reserve policy over this period, should we ignore the potential contribution of the low interest rates and lax regulatory regime that accompanied the preceding real-estate price run-up? It is all well and good for the fire-fighters to ask us aren't we glad they have such a high-powered hose with which to douse the raging conflagration. I suppose that a reasonable response might be yes, but where were you four years ago, and who started this fire anyway?

My suggestion for the many researchers interested in adding to our understanding of credit market imperfections would be to focus not so much on 2008 as on 2004-2006. Any economists or policy-makers who believe that the goal of policy is to restore the economy to the conditions of 2005 may be missing the core lesson here.

Does India’s government pay any heed to its economic advisers?

ECONOMISTS like nothing better than giving advice to governments. But why do they, of all people, imagine that anyone listens? In their models economists assume that governments, like other actors in the economy, have objectives of their own, which they seek to advance as best they can. They are not disinterested servants of the public good. So governments will ignore a recommendation from their advisers unless it suits them, in which case they would have done it anyway.

In his book “Prelude to Political Economy”, published in 2000, Kaushik Basu of Cornell University wrestled with this paradox. “If, seeing high unemployment in an economy, a person… advises entrepreneurs to employ more labourers, or consumers to demand more goods, this typically causes economists to share a laugh.” And yet economists routinely advise governments to act in the economy’s interests rather than their own. ...

The insurance industry’s biggest-ever acquisition has prompted the largest-ever rights issue: AIG and Prudential are both playing for huge stakes

INSURANCE is a pretty stodgy business. This week’s agreement by Prudential of Britain to buy AIG’s Asian life-insurance operations, AIA, is anything but. If the $35.5 billion deal goes through—and given the convulsions in both companies’ share prices, that is not certain—it will radically alter both Prudential and AIG and will provide a closely watched test of what can and cannot be done by financial firms as they try to build Asian franchises.

On paper, the transaction would transform Prudential into the region’s dominant insurance company. It will have a leading, if not the leading, presence in 15 big markets with a vast sales force offering critical health and investment products to a population that is becoming wealthy enough to appreciate them. Assuming the transaction goes through successfully, the proportion of sales Prudential generates from Asia should eventually expand from 30% to 80%. Prudential is paying a fraction of what AIA would have gone for prior to AIG’s implosion. It is a remarkable opportunity at a rather pedestrian price. ...

The central bank loses a vice-chairman but starts to regain its standing

THE Federal Reserve, accused by critics of monetary and regulatory malpractice, has seen its standing plummet. The House of Representatives has passed one bill to audit its monetary decisions and proposed others to strip it of regulatory duties. Almost a third of the Senate voted against confirming Ben Bernanke to a second term as chairman.

It appears, however, that its rehabilitation has begun. As part of negotiations on a financial-reform bill, Chris Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, is considering a proposal that would let the Fed retain most of its regulatory duties. Mr Dodd originally wanted to take oversight of banks away from the Fed and other regulators and give it to a new body. He wanted to hand oversight of consumer protection to another new creation, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. ...

A difficult time for a fund-raising spree

A SENIOR World Bank official describes its efforts to secure an additional $3 billion-5 billion in paid-in capital as a “once-in-a-generation increase to deal with the effects of a once-in-a-generation crisis”. The bank agreed to lend $32.9 billion to poor countries in the year to June 2009, two-and-a-half times the previous year’s outlay of $13 billion. If it carried on at this rate, Robert Zoellick, the bank’s president, warned in October, its lending would face constraints by the middle of this year.

But its search for funds is being complicated by two factors. Some of its rich-country backers have overstretched budgets of their own, to put it mildly. And other large multilateral development banks (MDBs) are also seeking cash. ...

Countries compete to weaken their currencies

ONCE upon a time, nations took pride in their strong currencies, seeing them as symbols of economic and political power. Nowadays it seems as if the foreign-exchange markets are home to a bunch of Charles Atlas’s 97-pound weaklings, all of them eager to have sand kicked in their faces.

First the dollar took a battering in 2009 when the return of risk appetite, and the ability to borrow the currency at very low rates, sent money flowing out of America for use in speculative “carry trade” transactions. Then the euro got pummelled because of concerns about the euro zone’s exposure to sovereign-debt problems in southern Europe. Finally sterling hit the canvas this week because of concerns about the British government’s deficit and the policy gridlock that may result from a hung parliament after a general election expected in May. ...