Net News, August/September 1995

The Chicago Board Options Exchange has become the latest of the Chicago exchanges to establish a Web site on the Internet, quietly beating the Chicago Board of Trade's ambitious site out of the gate (CBOT's Nancy Villanova has confirmed that their site will launch August 31).

The CBOE's site has a cozier, looser feel than many exchange sites. Some graphical elements are used whimsically, as in a hammer intruding into a page of text on the Options Institute; by clicking on it, visitors can order a free "Options Tool" promotional videotape. Text submission forms are common throughout the site, including a guestbook off of the home page which lends a personal feel to the surroundings. Be prepared, however - upon submitting one's name and address information, the visitor is shunted into a dead-end "Thank You" screen, and a few clicks on the Web-browser's Back icon are required to re-enter the active site.

Several features here will be familiar to those who have visited the CME and LIFFE sites, including archived press releases, an annual report and the traditional page of exchange and regional photos, here dubbed the Virtual Visit. Along with your choice of three on-screen sizes for each photo, the page also includes sound files recorded on the trading floor (as if 16-bit sound sampling wasn't noisy enough on its own).

The Product Information section includes thorough CBOE contract specifications, while statistics on the exchange's most active options, listed by day from mid-July, can be found under CBOE Marketplace. Recently, in the wake of increasing newsprint costs, the five U.S. options exchanges have begun to discuss making end-of-day prices available over the Net. Whether such a page would be featured on the CBOE site is an issue which may soon be addressed.

Finance Wat.ch (".ch" is the Internet domain code for Switzerland) is a graphically impressive on-line mall which hosts several European players in the financial industry. The Swiss Commodities Futures and Option Association makes its home here, as do both InfoCentre Financier and the International Finance and Commodities Institute.

Wat.ch's striking eye-shaped icons immediately grab the visitor's attention, but the site's most useful feature is its many searchable databases, with information on futures and options contracts and indices on 10 international exchanges. Visitors can search these databases along several pre-selected criteria, or by typing a specific word in a text-input field. Many other pages feature a similar "Find" field, and one can even scan the entire Wat.ch site for a single word.

Other notable features include the WWW Financial Yellow Pages, which improves on most hot lists by providing a concise but helpful description of each site with its hyperlink. Another hot list can be found under Financial Technology, with links to sites dealing with security and encryption issues. Term Finance is also helpful, a glossary of financial terms available in English, French, German and Italian.

The Securities Industry Association's new Web site, developed in conjunction with Internet provider giant UUNET Technologies, is a comprehensive guide to the national trade association. The site includes a background of their many services, along with summaries of policy papers, but most impressive are the encyclopedic lists of member firms, committee and division officers and SIA staff members. E-mail to specific staff members is occasionally offered by hyperlink, but as the address for all such links is info@sia.com, one might wish to include the addressee's name in the text of the message.

Though most of the site is text-based, the Industry Data page features several easy-to-read graphs of recent statistics. The SIA's 1996 events calendar is available month-by-month as HTML tables, with list boxes creatively used to store daily information (though links to the conference/meetings page would also be helpful). The list of "Cool Links" offers helpful links to key governmental sites, including pages for Congress and the Federal Register. This site will no doubt be included as a bookmark for many Net surfers in the financial industry.

Sean G. Thomas, Sean Thomas, Sean Garrett Thomas