A Web-based financial trading system

A new electronic financial market is fast emerging. Connected by highspeed networks, buyers and sellers are gathering in virtual marketplaces and revolutionizing the way business is conducted. The financial services industry, among the most innovative and aggressive in its use of IT, has created an entirely new online brokerage industry in just a few years. The principal functions of financial markets are to bring buyers and sellers together and to provide a price discovery mechanism for the assets being traded. The authors describe their financial bundle trading system (FBTS), a Web-based continuous electronic market that traders can use to execute bundle orders. With a bundle order, a trader can order a combination of stocks or assets. FBTS is in an experimental stage and is being extensively used for research at the University of Texas at Austin. Rapid advances in IT and growing competition are causing fundamental changes in the world's financial services industry. Because the FBTS is based on distributed objects, it has significant advantages over systems built with CGI scripts.