R. Steven Wunsch, whose electronic single-price auction for trading stocks irked the New York Stock Exchange, is seeking out a similar niche in London.
On a trip to London, Mr. Wunsch, the mountain-climbing president and chief executive of AZT Inc., which operates the Arizona Stock Exchange, said he found British regulators and institutional investors receptive to the notion of creating a U.K. equivalent.
"The regulatory situation seems if anything more accommodative than the situation in the States," Mr. Wunsch said.
Mr. Wunsch's system matches orders anonymously after hours. Unlike pure crossing systems, the exchange provides price discovery.
All matched orders are routed to BT Brokerage Corp., a unit of Bankers Trust Co. In the last four months of 1993, the infant stock exchange had an average volume of nearly 700,000 shares a day - enough to break even but a fraction of the Big Board's average volume of 264.5 million shares a day.
To operate in the United Kingdom, Mr. Wunsch said he would have to find a broker-dealer willing to stand behind the execution of the orders, as BT does.
But Mr. Wunsch still is at the exploratory stage, and says that actual plans for entering the market may take a number of iterations. One possibility might be to offer a trading facility for the London Stock Exchange's small stocks, which experience very wide spreads.
