BATS Exchange

BATS Exchange, Inc
legal form	Incorporated
founding	June 2005
Seat	Kansas City , Missouri
management	Joe Ratterman (CEO)
Number of employees	60 (2008)
Branch	Stock exchange trading
Website	www.batstrading.com

The BATS Exchange, Inc. (also BATS Trading or BATS Global Markets ) is an initiative founded in 1999 Tradebot Systems Inc. , in June 2005, was established operators of multilateral trading systems headquartered in Kansas City operates, since January 2006, the BATS trading platform .

On February 18, 2011, BATS announced the acquisition of Chi-X Europe . The joint company is to be run under the name BATS Chi-X Europe.

The name BATS is derived from the name Better Alternative Trading System .

Ownership structure

BATS belongs to a consortium consisting of investment banks and brokers . The main shareholders include Citigroup , Credit Suisse , Deutsche Bank , GETCO , JPMorgan , Lehman Brothers (until 2008), Lime Brokerage , Morgan Stanley , Merrill Lynch , Tradebot and Wedbush .

BATS (USA)

BATS was founded in June 2005 and started trading in January 2006. BATS was in the black for the first time in 2008.

In July 2009 BATS announced that it wanted to become active in the US futures market by setting up a new options exchange. This should start trading in the first quarter of 2010 and compete directly with the options exchanges, the International Securities Exchange and the Chicago Board Options Exchange , which have been established so far .

In March 2012, the company went public on the NASDAQ . However, due to technical mishaps, the share lost massive amounts of value within a very short time. It went public at an issue price of $ 16, but crashed to 4 ¢ within 900 milliseconds due to software errors. Because of the technical problems, other stocks (including Apple ) could no longer be traded.

BATS Europe

BATS Europe is a spin-off from BATS Trading and a multilateral trading system that has been developed since March 2008 and started trading in November 2008. In March 2009 BATS Europe achieved a trading share in the DAX of over 3 percent. With a trading volume of around 729 million euros, the system recorded its strongest trading volume to date on April 2, 2009.

Since October 31, 2008, the clearing of BATS Trading Europe has been handled by the central counterparty European Multilateral Clearing Facility (EMCF).

On July 20, 2009, tests began for a dark pool that BATS Europe put into operation on August 7, 2009. Similar to the Darkpool Xetra Midpoint, this executes the buy and sell orders invisibly in a separate book and exactly at the calculated mean price between the current bid and ask of the main market.