Lava Trading Connects to NASDAQ's Liquidity Tracker

New York, NY - The Nasdaq Stock Market, Inc. (NASDAQ�) has announced that Lava Trading Inc.'s high-performance front-end trader workstation, Lava Trading Floor�, is providing access to NASDAQ's Liquidity TrackerSM, a block trading facility that provides market participants with an alternative, efficient method to find and increase liquidity.

The Lava Trading Floor is a cutting-edge front-end trading system used by more than 70 trading firms. The Lava Trading Floor system provides traders with consolidated order information in a unified market data montage, order entry across all available execution services, design tools for smart placement features, and real-time monitoring and management of orders, positions, and profit and loss.

Liquidity Tracker began operating in December 2002 with all of NASDAQ's approximately 3,700 National Market and SmallCap securities and is accessible to participants via SuperMontageSM, NASDAQ's next generation trading system.

Liquidity Tracker, which is based on patent-pending technology, was developed by e-Xchange Advantage Corporation (eXA) and licensed to NASDAQ. When a broker arrives with a large customer order, Liquidity Tracker figures out from recent trading activity which other broker is the most likely trading partner for this order. Liquidity Tracker then arranges for the two brokers to interact and get the trade done quickly, with minimal market impact.

"Liquidity Tracker does electronically for NASDAQ-listed stocks what the NYSE specialist sometimes does manually for NYSE-listed stocks," said Adena Friedman, executive vice president of NASDAQ Data Products. "The addition of Lava's expertise to this collective effort further ensures the success of Liquidity Tracker, a plus for investors."

Richard Korhammer, co-founder, Chairman and CEO of Lava Trading, said, "We're pleased to offer Liquidity Tracker, and additional access to the NASDAQ marketplace, to Lava's customers. We're committed to providing our customers with order execution capability across all liquidity sources, and to addressing their electronic trading needs with fast, reliable and intelligent solutions."

Said Fred Federspiel, president of eXA. "Lava's expertise in market access will help traders get the most out of Liquidity Tracker and ultimately provide their clients with an opportunity to get a better price."

Lava Trading develops high-performance software for equity traders, and is a leader in providing market data distribution, trading technology, and Electronic Communication Networks (ECN) and exchange connectivity for NASDAQ market makers, broker dealers, and large institutional investors. Through Lava's patented ColorBook� technology, its customers execute on average more than 300 million shares a day, or approximately 20 percent of NASDAQ's average daily volume, via the company's fully redundant data centers.

About e-Xchange Advantage Corp.

Founded in 1999, e-Xchange Advantage Corporation builds its patent-pending trading technology into block trading tools for equity securities. On December 4, 2002, Liquidity Tracker, a deployment of eXA's proprietary technology, was launched on the NASDAQ Stock Market. The company is located in New York City. Investors include the NASDAQ Stock Market, Inc. and BiosGroup, Inc.

About NASDAQ

NASDAQ (OTCBB:NDAQ) is the world's largest electronic stock market. With approximately 3,700 companies, NASDAQ lists more companies and trades more shares per day than any other U.S. market. Over the past five years, NASDAQ has outpaced all other U.S. markets in listing IPOs. It is home to category-defining companies that are leaders across all areas of business including technology, retail, communications, financial services, media and biotechnology industries. NASDAQ is a key driver of capital formation.