Firefly’s VMS is based on advanced technology specifically designed with the needs of institutional traders in mind, a combination of sophisticated execution technology and state-of-the-art venue management tools. Some key competitive advantages are:

Liquidity: Firefly delivers this advantage by offering access to all major execution venues. In today’s highly fragmented markets the NBBO for a security may be concurrently offered on several exchanges, ATS’s, market makers and ECN’s. Firefly’s VMS brings these fragmented pools of liquidity to the trader in their entirety.

Speed: The market can move in an instant. The elapsed time to execute an order will have a significant impact on the price at which the order is filled. Firefly solves this problem, offering the competitive advantage of speed in two ways:

• Firefly offers a suite of advanced execution mechanisms that use a combination of market history and an instantaneous analysis of the current market state in order to identify what routes, sizes, and prices are to be sent for optimal order execution. For large institutional orders this feature offers a tremendous advantage - the ability to seek the best price automatically and more intelligently than the typical market scanning techniques.

• Firefly's high-speed, scalable servers are directly connected to all of the major execution venues using the industry standard FIX protocol. The technology's end-to-end reporting results in the fastest possible executions while delivering straight-through-processing to our clients.

Flexibility: By offering a completely customizable front-end that allows users to configure their desktop to match their trading styles, Firefly works with traders, not against them. This is a giant step ahead of fixed-format front-ends and web page based approaches that do not adapt to the needs of a particular client. The technology's architecture supports a single user executing trades in multiple accounts, multiple users executing trades in the same account(s), and the ability to monitor each trader's exposure in real-time. Our uniquely designed portfolio management tool allows traders to implement multiple trading strategies within a single account while tracking real-time profit and loss. The smart basket order entry feature facilitates rapid trading within portfolios and across market segments.

Neutrality & Anonymity: Firefly is market neutral and lacks a preference for where our clients execute orders. All orders are routed either directly by the trader or using our smart routing technology which relies on price, volume, and historical patterns to seek the best execution. Furthermore, all orders on Firefly are anonymous in the marketplace.