The Futures Industry Association meeting, taking place this week in Boca Raton,  is a gracious affair — bigwig-led panel discussions, rounds of golf and poolside cocktail parties.

This year there is a new participant: Upstart futures exchange, ELX Electronic Liquidity Exchange, is using the FIA as a platform to wine-and-dine potential clients, and launch its new name, having previously gone by the unofficial moniker “Four Seasons.”

But not all have rolled out the welcome mat. Craig Donohue, chief executive of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, took a pot shot at his new rival’s choice of name during a panel discussion at the FIA on Thursday. “If I was naming a new exchange I wouldn’t come up with a name that reminded people of a laxative.”

Donohue’s likely motivation for the thinly-veiled comparison between ELX and chocolate-flavored laxative Ex-Lax? ELX, led by a dozen banks and trading firms, is openly planning to give CME,  the world’s largest futures exchange, a run for its money with its new low-cost, electronic platform.

Although a fledgling venture, ELX is backed by a string of heavyweights. Backers so far include JPMorgan, Merrill Lynch & Co, Chicago hedge fund Citadel Investment Group, eSpeed Inc, Bank of America, Credit Suisse, Barclays Plc, Citigroup Inc, Deutsche Bank AG, GETCO LLC, PEAK6 and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc.

– Blog post by Lilla Zuill in New York and Ros Krasny in Boca Raton

Picture credit: www.forgotten-ny.com