The global fixed-income market is large and has experienced significant growth in trading volume and amount of debt outstanding over the last several years. For example, in the U.S. fixed-income market, there were approximately $22 trillion of fixed-income securities outstanding, including over $4.3 trillion of U.S. corporate bonds, as of September 30, 2003.

The total U.S. corporate bond market has experienced significant growth over the past five years. The total amount of U.S. corporate bonds outstanding has grown from $2.7 trillion as of December 31, 1998 to $4.3 trillion as of September 30, 2003. The average daily trading volume of U.S. corporate bonds also grew from $18.9 billion in 2002 (the first calendar year for which such data are available) to $20.7 billion in 2003.

The European credit market consists of a broad range of products, issuers and currencies. The average daily trading volume in the European credit market has grown significantly over the past five years, driven by many of the same factors that have driven growth in the U.S. high-grade corporate bond market.

Electronic trading is supplanting traditional trading processes in an increasing number of securities markets. In an electronic marketplace, substantially all of the participants’ actions are facilitated through an electronic medium, such as a private electronic network or over the Internet. This reduces the need for face-to-face or voice-to-voice participant interaction, thereby reducing the inefficiencies inherent in physical markets. The first markets to move to electronic trading have been for those products with the most liquidity, such as equities, U.S. Treasuries and futures in Europe and Asia.

By enabling institutional investors to view quotes from multiple broker-dealers, the Company’s electronic trading platform enhances the likelihood of best price execution. The competitive nature of the Company’s platform helps motivate broker-dealers to provide their most aggressive prices in hopes of completing a trade with their institutional investor client.

The Company’s commingled multi-dealer inventory of bonds, which is updated daily, consists of approximately $90 billion in indicative bids and offers. Subject to applicable regulatory requirements, institutional investors can search bonds in inventory based on any combination of issuer, issue, rating, maturity, spread-to-Treasury, size and dealer providing the listing, in a fraction of the time it takes to do so manually. Institutional fixed-income investors can also request bids and offers on the Company’s electronic trading platform on any debt security in a comprehensive database of U.S. and European corporate bonds.

The improved efficiency provided by the Company’s electronic trading platform also reduces the overall costs of institutional investors by reducing the time and labor required to conduct broad product and price discovery. In addition, the Company’s Corporate BondTicker eliminates the need for manually-intensive phone calls to gather information concerning historical transaction prices.

Total commissions increased by $27.0 million or 265.4% to $37.1 million for the nine months ended September 30, 2003 from $10.2 million for the comparable period in 2002.

Total information and user access fees increased by $587,000 or 301.4% to $782,000 for the nine months ended September 30, 2003 from $195,000 for the comparable period in 2002.