FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Bear Stearns to Provide Faster Futures Trade Execution and Enhanced System Stability Through New Hosting Agreement with Trading Technologies

CHICAGO, July 19, 2006 — Bear, Stearns & Co. Inc. and Trading Technologies International, Inc. (TT) today announced that Bear Stearns plans to enhance its global futures electronic trading infrastructure to provide customers with faster execution and increased reliability through TT's hosting solution, TTNET™ .

Bear Stearns offers market-leading execution and clearing services and is on the forefront of providing customers with new technology to take better advantage of their portfolio strategies. TTNET, TT’s Application Service Provider (ASP)/hosting solution, is designed to accelerate customer access time to international futures markets and to increase trading platform stability through its fully redundant data centers situated in strategic locations close to the various exchange servers. These enhancements come at a key time with both significant growth in the industry and Bear Stearns achieving record futures volumes.

Ron Hersch, a Senior Managing Director and the Head of Futures at Bear Stearns, said, "We are excited to take advantage of TT's high performance hosting platform because it is designed to provide our customers with seamless access to a multi-exchange trading infrastructure. We believe our customers will be able to better take advantage of their trading strategies while simultaneously reducing the possibility of system outages that could prevent them from seizing of market opportunities."

Building upon Bear and TT's long and productive relationship, TTNET will host Bear Stearns' entire global TT trading infrastructure, which includes TT’s X_TRADER® order-entry software.

Harris Brumfield, CEO of TT, said, "We are very pleased to have a firm of Bear Stearns' stature extend their relationship with us to include TTNET. Their global reach, strong ties to the hedge fund community and expertise in automated trading make them a great fit for this service."

TTNET is a full-service ASP offering for Futures Commission Merchants (FCMs), trading firms, banks and other institutions that prefer an outsourced solution. TT technicians are responsible for network administration, hardware configuration, infrastructure maintenance, data line management, upgrades, backups, security and user support from mirrored network data centers in Chicago, New Jersey, Frankfurt and London. Additional data centers are planned for Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong and Sydney. Fast, highly resilient and fully redundant connections to the world’s top futures exchanges optimize uptime and allow TTNET customers to quickly deploy trading screens in virtually any country.

Bear Stearns is scheduled to be operational on TTNET by this fall.

About Bear Stearns
Founded in 1923, Bear, Stearns & Co. Inc. is a leading investment banking and securities trading and brokerage firm, and the major subsidiary of The Bear Stearns Companies Inc. (NYSE:BSC). With approximately $58.4 billion in total capital, Bear Stearns serves governments, corporations, institutions and individuals worldwide. The company's business includes corporate finance and mergers and acquisitions, institutional equities and fixed income sales and trading, securities research, private client services, derivatives, foreign exchange and futures sales and trading, asset management and custody services. Through Bear, Stearns Securities Corp., it offers financing, securities lending, clearing and technology solutions to hedge funds, broker-dealers and investment advisors. Headquartered in New York City, the company has approximately 12,500 employees worldwide. For additional information about Bear Stearns, please visit the firm's website at www.bearstearns.com.

About Trading Technologies
Trading Technologies (www.tradingtechnologies.com) develops high-performance trading software for derivatives profe