Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Our first question is coming Chris Donat of Sandler O’Neill
Chris Donat - Sandler O’Neil & Partners L.P.
I guess the first question that I am trying to get my arms around is on the trading revenue, the net principle gains -- can you give us more color on what drove that, was it more volume and I know we don’t use the participation rates and realization rates, but just any color you have would be helpful to us understanding it?
Michael LaBranche
Well we are trying to move away from participation rates, because you probably can gather and we have been doing that for several quarters now because of the nature of the way the stocks trade today. We have made some good progress in our technology. We continue to build technology to allow us to quote an electronic market. It’s not just on our cash business but the other businesses as well.
There was an exceptional amount of activity in the marketplace over the first three months of this year; basically related to a lot of things that were going on the financial community I would say. The other part of it is that our technology, as I said, is allowing us to trade more effectively. We have been able to grow our businesses both in London and Hong Kong. We are doing well in our EPS and options trading and we are doing much better in our traditional cash business, at the same time, as we are effectively lowering our cost.
So this is an environment where we try to do better and we showed revenues of -- what Jeff described is what we call net revenues, real trading revenues of $56 million, against the number of I think was $34 million a year previously.
As I said before I can’t give you guidance in what the trading is going to be like for the next year but what we are really going to do is make sure that we are able to manage our cost so that if things slow down, we can still generate cash.
Chris Donat - Sandler O’Neil & Partners L.P.
Okay, and then just thinking about volatility and some of the other factors in this market, with the volumes, are you doing say more small trades or more large trades, or are you taking chunkier positions or how does it compare to say a year ago or pre-hybrid?
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