Newswise — It is no secret that liquidity problems are troubling Wall Street. Bear Stearns, an eighty-five-year-old financial community staple that has survived the Great Depression and a slew of recessions, recently struck a fire sale deal with JP Morgan Chase for two dollars per share in hopes of saving the behemoth from bankruptcy. After days and weeks of denials that it was experiencing liquidity problems, Bear was forced into a JP Morgan Chase-led, government-backed bailout.
"Established markets can't form a platform quick enough to help add liquidity when there becomes an apparent need for one, as we're seeing in the case of the Bear Stearns buyout," explains Todd Ault, CEO of Zealous Trading Group, creators of ZATS Markets, a new electronic marketplace for the trading of illiquid and restricted securities worldwide. "When liquidity problems arose with Auction Rate Securities, we equipped our platform with the ability to trade them and partnered with an active buyer."
While liquidity problems are nothing new to Wall Street, ZATS Markets offers an integrated private electronic marketplace that provides global buyers and sellers of restricted, illiquid, and alternative assets an infrastructure in which to issue, distribute, trade, research, and promote their products and services in a more effective and efficient manner.
"As markets grow more conservative in light of the subprime mortgage crisis and ominous signposts such as the Bear Stearns buyout, the trading of illiquid securities will offer investors exciting new avenues for potential growth," says Ault.
Biography on Expert: Todd Ault, President and CEO of Zealous Trading Group, Co-Founder of ZATS
Todd Ault is the Company's President and CEO of Zealous Trading Group and ZATS Co-Founder. Mr. Ault has been in the investment banking and asset management industry for over SIXTEEN years, and started with Dean Witter Reynolds Inc, then went to Prudential Securities Inc.
Mr. Ault worked with Strome Susskind, L.P. a $1.2 Billion hedge fund from 07/98 - 6/05 in portfolio management. While at Strome, Mr. Ault worked on several activism campaigns including Taco Cabana, Jack In The Box (formerly Foodmaker) and 21st Century Holdings Co.
Through his activism experience, Mr. Ault acquired AMEX listed Franklin Capital, a (business development company (BDC). Mr. Ault became CEO of Franklin Capital and restructured it from a BDC to successful medical device company called Patient Safety Technologies, Inc. (OTCBB: PSTX). Mr. Ault was also an early investor and strategic partner of NYPPE.
Mr. Ault serves as an expert resource on the following:"¢ Illiquid and restricted securities"¢ Auction Rate Securities"¢ Investment banking"¢ Asset Management "¢ Hedge Funds
Mr. Ault can address the following FAQs:"¢ What is the benefit of alternative trading systems?"¢ How might alternative trading systems help curtail current Wall Street woes?"¢ Why are stocks becoming illiquid?"¢ What does the buy-out mean for Wall Street?
ABOUT ZATSZATS electronic marketplace is a global community of trading counterparties in our targeted products and services providing an infrastructure in which to optimize and support investment and trading strategies for participants and they view ourselves as a trusted business partner to our members.They believe that, by using ZATS electronic platform, market participants can achieve price improvement over the current execution and trade settlement processes. Electronic trade execution for the restricted and illiquid securities offers cost efficiencies by providing firm posted prices and reducing back office overhead, and allows us to accelerate the introduction of new products on our platform. The combination of electronic trade execution and integrated trading and market data services facilitates all phases of trade execution and processing from front-office to back-office, from trading and risk management to settlement.By automating the transaction process by which restricted or illiquid securities trade, we believe that ZATS will experience mass adoption amongst current participants and thus dramatically increasing liquidity opening the asset class to an entirely new group of investors who previously would not consider the class as a viable investment sector because of the illiquid, document intensive, and closed nature of the securities. Their goal is to have ZATS platform on the desktop of every investment professional worldwide.
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