About our Sponsors

Deutsche Bank

Deutsche Bank is a leading global investment bank with a strong and profitable private clients franchise. A leader in Germany and Europe, the bank is continuously growing in North America, Asia and key emerging markets. With Euro1,501 billion in assets and 77,053 employees in 72 countries,Deutsche Bank offers unparalleled financial services throughout the world. The bank competes to be the leading global provider of financial solutions for demanding clients creating exceptional value for its shareholders and people.

Global Markets’ equity business, Global Markets Equity, is a market leading provider of equity and equity-linked products to institutional, corporate and retail clients globally. The award-winning platform offers scalability and flexibility in its design, providing a global network of execution services and financial engineering expertise

Baader Bank

Baader Bank AG is one of the leading investment banks in Germany in the field of financial instrument trading.

Baader Bank offers its clients expertise acquired over many years and the highest standards of financial instrument market making, trading and settlement in the world’s financial markets. Baader Bank advises on and assists mid-cap companies in corporate actions, IPOs and the issuing of corporate bonds. In its role as a corporate broker, the institution produces equity research and acts as a designated sponsor and market maker.

Using its innovative technology, Baader Bank manages trading in a total of 700,000 securities, including equities, bonds, securitised derivatives and exchange-traded funds (ETFs), making it the leading securities trading specialist in Germany. The bank, which has 430 employees, has its headquarters in Unterschleissheim, near Munich.

Baader is a member of the Xetra electronic trading system of Deutsche Börse. As a member of the main European exchanges, Baader has direct access to markets like Eurex, the London Stock Exchange, NYSE-Euronext, the Six Swiss Exchange or Chi-X Europe.

Deutsche Börse Group

 Xetra provides listing, trading and clearing services to issuers, intermediaries and investors. Xetra provides efficient access to the capital markets, supports the latest trading techniques and provides an ever-growing range of tradable securities such as stocks, exchange traded funds, bonds, warrants and certificates.

The trading system of the same name sets the highest standards in terms of reliability, security, speed and innovation. Orders are executed at optimum conditions in a central, fully electronic open order book. Xetra offers the highest liquidity, transparency and cost efficiency to 240 European banks and brokerage firms from 18 countries. Approximately 900,000 securities are currently traded using Xetra technology, more than on any other trading platform.
With its integrated clearing facility provided by Eurex Clearing, it is also one of the most advanced trading platforms in terms of counterparty risk management.

Xetra is part of Deutsche Börse Group which is one of the world’s leading service providers for the securities industry with a product and service offering for issuers, investors, intermediaries and data vendors. The Group covers the entire process chain from trading, through clearing, to settlement and securities custody. Furthermore, Deutsche Börse offers market data, indices and analyses and is a service provider for the development and operation of IT systems. Deutsche Börse Group is one of the world’s largest stock exchange organizations.

ITG

ITG is an independent research and execution broker that partners with global portfolio managers and traders to provide unique data-driven insights throughout the investment process. From investment decision through settlement, ITG helps clients understand market trends, improve performance, mitigate risk and navigate increasingly complex markets. ITG is headquartered in New York with offices in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific.

Liquidnet

Liquidnet brings together the world’s largest asset managers and public companies on a single network that directly connects traders, portfolio managers, analysts and corporate issuers. By revolutionising the flow of ideas, liquidity and capital we have helped change an entire industry while enabling the key players in the institutional investment process to more efficiently capture and retain alpha. Instead of an asset manager searching the ends of the earth for the liquidity they need, Liquidnet enables a buy-side trader to keep those orders protected with a trading system that could bring liquidity to execute against those orders without moving the market. By bringing together institutional buyers and sellers of large blocks of equity securities, Liquidnet enables them to trade with each other directly and anonymously via the Internet on our electronic trading platform. When they use Liquidnet, members enhance the quality and speed of trade execution, gain price improvements for their trades, and, ultimately, lower overall trading costs. It enables anonymous, one-to-one negotiations of large block trades and the creation and strategic access to additional liquidity from external markets, and allows us to serve the broader requirements of our customers, including program and transition trading. Liquidnet members trade equity securities listed in 39 countries.

Progress Software

Progress Software's award-winning Apama Complex Event Processing engine offers a flexible and powerful platform for algorithmic trading, FX eCommerce, risk and compliance monitoring and other high frequency, low latency capital markets applications.

As well as industry leading solutions, Progress Apama offers a highly scalable technology infrastructure, extensive data connectivity options as well as a rich catalogue of components to enable rapid development of bespoke capital markets applications.

With Progress Apama, capital markets firms can leverage a single highly extensible platform in multiple areas of their business thereby simultaneously reducing the total cost of technology ownership and realising the benefits of both a buy and build IT strategy.

SIX Swiss Exchange

SIX Swiss Exchange is the most important independent exchange in Europe. We offer outstanding liquidity in trading of Swiss securities and connect companies from around the world with international investors and trading participants. Our self-regulatory regime enables us to create particularly market-oriented framework conditions for listing and trading in our attractive segments Equities, Bonds, ETFs, ETPs and Structured Products and Warrants. SIX Swiss Exchange multiplies the locational advantages of the Swiss financial marketplace with first-rate services and is an ideal listing location for companies of every origin, size and sector. With the world’s fastest trading technology X-stream INET as well as the most advanced connectivity options and interfaces, we offer our trading participants excellent trading conditions. We maintain a close dialogue with both our domestic and foreign customers, working intensively with them to create optimal conditions for their success. Furthermore, we offer them access to a strong global network. It includes the market data provider SIX Exfeed Ltd, the index provider STOXX, which distributes Switzerland’s most important blue-chip index SMI®, as well as Scoach, the most important exchange for structured products in Europe, and the fund database Swiss Fund Data.

SIX Swiss Exchange is part of SIX which offers first-rate services in the areas of securities trading, clearing and settlement, as well as financial market information and payment transactions on a global scale.

Bloomberg Tradebook

Bloomberg Tradebook is Bloomberg’s agency broker that partners with both the buy-side and sell-side to provide high-quality liquidity, market insight, and customized solutions based on innovative technologies. Founded in 1996, Tradebook offers its customer base trading solutions for equities, futures, options, and foreign exchange (FX) to actively manage complex trading strategies in more than 100 global exchanges.

We are a leading global agency broker that provides direct market access and a breadth of trading analytics and algorithms to institutional traders who seek maximum alpha on every market transaction.

Tradebook has been ranked as the #1 Broker for global equity trading in the Institutional Investor best execution league tables for the third year in a row. (Nov 2011/2010/2009 Issues). Pension & Investment Magazine ranked Tradebook as the #1 Broker for Small Cap and Micro Cap trading. (March 2011 issue).