Effective as of 4 May 2009, the SIX Swiss Exchange Ltd will fully migrate to Zurich trading in the Swiss blue chip shares previously conducted via SWX Europe Ltd.

As announced in November 2008, SIX Swiss Exchange has now consolidated the trading of all Swiss equities under the umbrella of SIX Swiss Exchange. As of 4 May 2009, all Swiss stocks will once again be traded via SIX Swiss Exchange in Zurich. The blue chips previously traded on SWX Europe in London will constitute the newly created “Swiss Blue Chip Segment“ of SIX Swiss Exchange. This unification of trading will lead to lower costs as well as a stronger position in the increasingly competitive securities exchange industry. The restructuring will afford trading participants administrative and technical advantages, and issuers will benefit from a reduction of complexity. Going forward, Swiss law alone will be applicable in terms of the regulation and surveillance of issuers and market participants.

More extensive information in this regard can be accessed at:

SIX Swiss Exchange Press releaseNr. 20/2009

Press release of the Regulatory Board Nr. 1/2009

It has no matter if in crisis or not the listed Indexfonds ETF (Exchange Traded Funds) is a Story of Growth: In the first quarter of 2009 their trading volume at the Swiss Exchange increased over the previous year by almost 14 percent to 9.9 billion Swiss francs, while the Trade with shares fell over 50 percent. An ETF-Index can always be physically or synthetically displayed. When in the physical display all securities in the Index have been bought, it is a “full replication”. This for example with a wide spread World share index can cause problems with illiquid assets and high transaction costs. This is why only a representative selection of the values in the index is invested by the “optimized physical replication”. Including mathematical optimization models, the idea is to achieve a decent Deviation (Tracking Error) in the time period of the index.