Abstract: An anonymous trading system identifies the best bids and offers from those counterparties with which each party is currently eligible to deal, while maintaining the anonymity of the potential counterparty and the confidentiality of any specific credit limitations imposed by the anonymous potential counterparty. To that end, each bid or offer for a particular type of financial instrument is prescreened by the system for compatibility with limited credit information (for example, a one bit flag indicating whether a predetermined limit has already been exceeded) and an anonymous "Dealable" price is calculated for each of the traders dealing with that particular financial instrument.

Abstract: A distributed processing on-line automated trading system uses structured messages to represent each stage in the negotiation between a market maker (quoter) and a potential buyer or seller (requestor). Such a system is subject to uncertainties caused by the fact that a variable time is required for an order (buy or sell) message to be transmitted from the requestor to the quoter, or for a cancel (quote interrupt) message to be transmitted from the quoter to the requestor. Furthermore, it is possible that an equipment failure in the network, either in a communication link or even at the workstation of one of the traders, will prevent a small fraction of such order messages and cancel messages from reaching their intended destination within the relatively short time-frame typically associated with an on-line transaction system.

Abstract: A respective unique dormant address is permanently associated with each of two sibling computers located at a particular node of a communications network. A selected one of the sibling computers is activated by associating an overriding common active node address with the selected computer. Application programs running at other nodes of the network utilize this active node address and thus interface with whichever sibling computer is identified by the active node address. Accordingly, the dormant computer and its physical connection to the network may be monitored by the communications software using its unique dormant address and the dormant computer is always available to replace the active computer in a manner that is transparent to any other computers connected to other nodes of the network.

Abstract: A computer network system for simultaneously communicating between computer terminals at various bank locations for the purpose of entering a transaction for the exchange of currency of a selected currency pair provides a method for preventing a trading communication involving a selected currency pair between two banks wherein there is already a trading communication in progress between the two banks involving the same currency pair.