• Significant reduction in trading costs
• The ability to respond quickly to changing market conditions
• The ability to take direct action without visible middlemen

The trends seemed to indicate that there was considerable competition for the trading business and that the competition could be expected to heat up considerably more; but that there was no indication of anything more than competition for the stock brokers' business. The winner would be the player who managed to charge the lowest brokerage fees and still remain profitable.

Extrapolation led to consideration of a trading site that charged the fee that resulted in one dollar of profit for each offer (either to buy or sell) and matched buyers' and sellers' offers; then provided the service of ensuring that the transfer of funds and equities took place quickly and without any effort on the part of the trading parties.

Further consideration indicated that this approach would simply lead to being subjected to competitive pressures from parties who need not (initially) be profitable - in which case the winner would be the organization with the deepest pockets.

The most competitive proposition would be to provide a no-cost trading service. Deployment of such a system preemptively would essentially close the doors on competitors unless they chose to offer a similarly free service - which would not seem to fit the paradigm set of most of the prospective players.

Yet, there is plenty of room for profitability in this picture. With the prospect of becoming the world exchange there would be considerable opportunity to offer trading data in many forms to a worldwide market for moderate fees and still enjoy enormous profitability.

The design objective has been to make the market accessible freely to everyone who wishes to participate. Investors need not have much to work with. If an investor wishes to buy one share of a one-dollar stock, that investor should (and will) be treated as well as another investor who wants to buy a million shares of a thousand-dollar stock. With internet access and computer processing it's possible.

Quite some time ago I read that one businessman's credo was: "Win-win or no deal." I like that slant on business; and extend it to this project with slight rewording - our credo will be "Fair trade or no trade," meaning that this system will only trade with absolute fairness to both parties. One basic requirement, then, is that neither this system nor the sponsoring organization may participate in trades. Crossed markets, for example, are resolved not to the benefit of the trading system, but to the mutual benefit of the trading parties. This system will earn profits only by making trade data available to subscribers on a fee basis.

An overall system design has been completed - and the critical trading engine software has been written, tested, and debugged. The software is written to conform to the International Standard ISO/IEC 9899:1999(E) with POSIX extensions. Within that context, it incorporates dynamic self-scaling and load-balancing. It's remarkably small and breathtakingly fast.

Inquiries invited.