Worth noting from the interview above: Today’s event follows an industry-wide “Taste of New York” event that raised $1.7 million for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. That’s one day’s operating costs for the hospital, according to Joseph Mecane, who co-chairs the hospital’s Wall Street Committee and is an executive VP at NYSE Euronext. That’s why we appreciate your support for our Floor Broker Charity Trading Day or your other contributions to this worthy cause.

Aw, c’mon, don’t think of it as back-to-work Monday.

Think of it as a thing of beauty, just as photographer Frank Ostrander turns a train line into a work of art in this photograph, West Shore Line at Storm King.

Or think of it as a chance to do the world a little bit of good. Today is Floor Brokers Charity Trading Day. NYSE Euronext will donate to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital all of its net transaction fees for your orders executed today by floor brokers in NYSE and NYSE Amex securities. St. Jude’s is where children battle cancer and other deadly illnesses, where families never pay for treatments not covered by insurance, where no child is ever denied treatment because of the family’s inability to pay, where you can’t look at the testimonials without getting all choked up, where doctors from around the world pioneer and share the new research on how to better wage this terribly, terribly important fight. You can help with your orders today, or by making a donation to the hospital.

It’s not a Monday,it’s a chance to make a difference. And that’s a thing of beauty.

From Marisa Ricciardi: Beware! The Marvel Superheroes (NYSE:MVL) invaded the NYSE early this morning for the Annual Kids’ Day Holiday Party. The employees and their children had a blast as they were treated to all types of entertainment from magic to face painting to arts and crafts. A few of the lucky ones even got the chance to ring the Opening and Closing Bells accompanied on the podium by Captain America and The Hulk. Guests also had the opportunity to preview Marvel’s new Superhero Squad Show as they snacked on delicious treats. And if that wasn’t enough, each child left with a bag filled with plenty of toys and games to last them way past the holiday season.

Don’t forget, your orders to NYSE floor brokers on Monday will benefit St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital. (NYX)

The power of mathematics as language (wish I spoke it!) (Times, hat tip to Paul Kedrosky)

TOPIX futures will start trading on NYSE Liffe in summer 2010. (NYX)

Unpacking the LSE’s outage: a tale of A strange tale of smart order routing, auctions and competition. (FT.com)

The first real Iberian index ETF launches on our Lisbon market. (NYX) And a Poland ETF launches on NYSE Arca. (NYX)

To be thankful for: timely intervention (Robert Bruner)

SmartPool migrates to our Universal Trading Platform. (NYX)

Why a fifth multi-lateral trading facility in Europe? NYSE Euronext’s Cees Vermaas surveys the competitive landscape. (FT Trading Room)

It’s getting harder to make profits in high-frequency trading. (Traders)

NYSE to celebrate 3rd annual Israel Day on Dec. 2 (NYX)

On an ugly day in the markets, here’s a beautiful photograph: Moodna Viaduct by Tom Doyle (CornwallLocal)
That’s the trestle my commuter train passes over every day, and the view, obviously, is breathtaking. Except for this time of year, when I go to work and come home in the dark. Oh well — enjoy!

Institutional Investor magazine is out with its annual survey of trading costs, in which Elkins/McSherry looks at all-in transaction costs in equities in 47 countries. No news here: NYSE-listed equities again best the rest.

The article says that in contrast to the longstanding downward trend, trading costs rose this year in equities markets around the world because of the extraordinary price volatility that started last year and continued through the first quarter of 2009. Despite that, costs for U.S. stocks remained the lowest in the world, with transaction costs for NYSE-listed issues at 15.40 basis points, or 16.7 percent lower than Nasdaq-listed issues’ 17.97 basis points. The global average was 41.38 basis points.

The magazine’s survey of trading costs usually includes a table listing costs by country, but neither the print nor the online version seems to have it this year. Maybe it will be posted later. The one constant is NYSE-listed issues coming out the leader. In fact, that was the topic of one my very first posts on this blog, back in December 2005. It was the same result in 2006. Not to mention 2007. And 2008. I think you get the picture.

Speaking of history:

Today in NYSE History
24 Nov. 1890 — Banker and Wall Street financier, August Belmont, died.

Today also is the birthday of the Dale Carnegie, author of the classic “How To Win Friends and Influence People” (born 1888, died 1955, excellent obit here); and Pete Best (68 today), who was for a time the drummer for a certain classic rock band. I know, I know — I don’t have to tell you.

Gold ETF’s Lustrous 5-Year Anniversary (CNBC)

[I should have gone down to the floor to see if those guys needed help holding those gold bars.]

Floor Brokers Charity Trading Day to raise money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. (NYX)

Equity is in vogue again in Europe. (FT)

NYSE Euronext Commission Head Warns On Corp-Governance Reforms (WSJ)

Dollar General, one of the biggest private equity-backed IPOs of the year, makes it debut on NYSE. (NYX)

Exchanges Will Push Clearing, Not OTC Trades, NYSE Euronext’s Jones Says (Bloomberg)

Is your firm ready to trade five-character symbols on NYSE?

Celadon Group trucks over to NYSE from Nasdaq. (NYX)

U.S. financial trade tax faces uphill battle (Reuters)

New online form to submit a “clearly erroneous trade” request (NYX)

Yes, Dark Pool Trades Are On the Tape (WSJ)

WSJ Reinstates Dividend Table (Talking Biz News)

The changing voice of business journalism — since the 1800s (Talking Biz News)

Duncan Niederauer on Mentoring Madness, IPOs, China and the market (CNBC)

Have a great weekend, folks.

Today in NYSE History (NYX)
20 Nov. 1939 — The NYSE launched a new publication, “The Exchange,” a magazine for individual investors.

“Movers & Changers” judges and finalists ring the Opening Bell.

Mentoring Madness takes over the Trading Floor.

Snoop Dogg and Maria Bartiromo share a moment on stage.

From Marisa Ricciardi: NYSE Euronext kicked-off Global Entrepreneurship Week with the second annual “Mentoring Madness” event on Monday, Nov. 16. CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo hosted this two hour event featuring conversations with the four judges from the “Movers & Changers” competition - TOM’S Shoes Founder Blake Mycoskie, BR Guest Restaurant Group Founder and President Stephen Hanson, Rapper Calvin “Snoop Dogg” Broadus, and Starwood Capital Group Chairman and CEO Barry Sternlicht. The judges and competition finalists also rang the Opening Bell to jump-start the day’s events.

In front of an audience of college students, the business leaders offered valuable insight into how they launched their companies and brands. While their individual stories differed, reoccurring themes quickly emerged such as following your passion, working hard, staying grounded and not being afraid to fail.

MTV (NYSE:VIA) and NYSE Euronext co-sponsored “Movers & Changers” to challenge young people to effect social change. Winners Nic Lagettta, Shea Shelton and Jay Zhao of Tulane University’s team, WET Tea won the ultimate prize of $25,000 in start-up funds with the idea to sell high-quality tea to support the Gulf Coast Wetlands. The judges were so inspired with what the students presented that they spontaneously decided to kick in $15,000 of their own money to be awarded to the two runner-ups in addition to the $5,000 already awarded to pursue their business ideas.

As a sponsor of Global Entrepreneurship Week, we are proud to support these programs and would like to thank all students who submitted entries in the “Movers & Changers” challenge. We invite you to pass along the “Mentoring Madness” web-cast to any budding entrepreneurs you may know and encourage them to attend next year’s events. Together, we can continue promoting innovative thinking and inspire the entrepreneurial leaders of tomorrow.

From Feargal O’Sullivan, High Performance Messaging at NYSE Technologies:

I’m here in Portland, Oregon, the city with the best micro-breweries, I’m told (a claim I’ll be sure to validate this evening), for Super Computing ’09. We’re back in action with our partners Voltaire and Intel, this time showing an enhanced version of the NYSE Technologies Data Fabric 10GigE RDMA demo we built for the Intel Developer’s Forum in September. You can read more about it in our press release or read on for a summary.

For the demonstration, we are using 12 identical, Intel Xeon 5570-based servers with NetEffect 10GigE NICs, running NYSE Technologies Data Fabric and Voltaire VMS, on a real-time Linux kernel. Note: Data Fabric can seamlessly switch between using LDMA, RDMA or TCP to transport data.

On one server, a publisher application generates 1 million, 100-byte messages per second, inserts a timestamp and then sends them to five subscribers on five other servers, all over 10GigE RDMA. One of those subscribers reflects the message back to the publisher box, which then timestamps again and calculates how long the message took.

Meanwhile a different publisher application on a different server generates 50,000, 100-byte messages per second, inserts a timestamp and then sends them to five subscribers on the remaining five servers. These servers use the exact same type of 10GigE NICs only this time Data Fabric is configured to publish using the standard Linux TCP stack rather than using the RDMA iWarp hardware acceleration built onto the NIC. One of those subscribers “reflects” the message back to the publisher box which then timestamps again and calculates how long the message took.

To display everything we have a charting application showing the throughput and 1-second average latency of each transport. Drop by the Intel Booth (#1935) to see the comparison for yourself. Oh… okay… I’ll fill you in here in case you can’t make it. On average, Data Fabric RDMA has a seven times better latency profile than Data Fabric TCP (its lack of jitter is an even bigger improvement) and can handle 20 times the throughput.

So, NYSE Technologies Data Fabric and the MAMA API give users the flexibility to deploy applications with whatever latency profile they need for the business use case, all through a simple configuration change.

For:
• Ultra-Low-latency: Local Direct Memory Access on a single server.
• Low-latency: Remote Direct Memory Access over 10GigE or Infiniband.
• Enterprise Fan-out: TCP over 1GigE.

From Daniel Romanelli, Managing Director, Business Development, NYSE Technologies:

As more and more exchanges are offering direct market access, brokers around the world are looking for solutions to provide pre-trade risk controls. NYSE Technologies has created the Risk Management Gateway (RMG) Suite to meet these demands and provide a flexible deployed system.

We’ve also been winning awards: Bursa Malaysia’s DMA platform for derivatives (which is powered by the RMG) was recently named the “Best Innovation by An Exchange” by the Futures & Options World (FOW) Awards.

And we’re not stopping there: we have recently released an updated Webinar (now archived for playback here) that explains the RMG systems available now for US Cash Equities. In this quick presentation we describe the RMG Direct™ and RMG Service Bureau™ product lines and how they can complement any member firm’s current trading risk management solutions.

During the webinar, a poll of participants confirmed that risk controls are at the top of the financial industry’s agenda:
• 87% of respondents said pre-trade risk management is an important aspect of preventing systematic risk in today’s markets
• In terms of deployment of a risk-management solution for sponsored-access clients, 37% of those surveyed said they are currently in production or have plans to deploy within the next six months.
• Asked what factors are important in choosing a risk management solution, the results were:
o 90%: Latency
o 75%: Total cost of ownership
o 55%: Normalized view of risk
o 50%: Time to market

More to come on this important topic. Please look to this space for future updates and information on the Risk Management Gateway Suite! As always for more information please contact us by e-mailing: NYSE-Technologies-Sales@nyx.com

From Steven Poser in Strategic Analysis and Statistics:

NYSE Arca offers higher price improvement for market orders than other venues, as shown in the table below:

NYSE Arca’s proprietary market order algorithm, attractive rebates for posting liquidity, in combination with market order interaction with two special order types, differentiates NYSE Arca from other markets. The Mid-Point Passive Liquidity (MPL) and Post No Preference Blind (PNP B) order types on NYSE Arca allow liquidity providers to offer dark liquidity that is aggressively priced, inside the NBBO. Market orders will execute against these orders, resulting in approximately 22% of net shares receiving price improvement of market order volume.

The MPL order is an undisplayed limit order that is priced at the midpoint of the Protected Best Bid and Offer (PBBO). MPL orders generally interact with all order types including contra MPLs excluding: cross or directed orders. MPL orders will be entered as a limit order, but are executable only at the midpoint of the NBBO. When the market is locked, eligible MPLs will trade at the locked price. MPLs have a minimum entry and execution size of 100 shares.

The PNP B order is an undisplayed limit order priced at or through the Protected Best Bid and Offer (PBBO), with a tradable price set at the contra side of the PBBO. When the PBBO moves away from the price of the PNP B and the prices continue to overlap, the limit price of the PNP B will remain undisplayed and its tradable price will be adjusted to the contra side of the PBBO.  When the PBBO moves away from the price of the PNP B, and the prices no longer overlap, the PNP B shall convert to a displayed PNP limit order.

(Additionally, most NYSE Arca listed products have a Lead Market Maker, who is required to quote both sides of the market at all times with a minimum spread. Some 95% of all U.S. Exchange Traded Products are listed on NYSE Arca.)