Interesting day today for NYSE Euronext. They are down another 2% today. The reason it is so interesting to me is that they just announced that 2007 trading volume rose across all its major platforms.

U.S. cash equities exchange volume averaged a record 2.6 billion shares handled per day, a 16% increase from 2006. European cash markets volume increased 47% in 2007, as 323 million transactions were reported for the year.

Volume on Liffe, NYSE Euronext's European futures and options market, increased 30% to a record 949 million contracts traded in 2007.

NYSE Arca Options, the U.S. options trading platform, recorded a record 306 million contracts traded in 2007, a 71% increase.

All these number look pretty positive to me. To go with that, they also just announced that its NYSE MatchPoint electronic trading system had received U.S. regulatory approval and would start operations on Jan. 22.

MatchPoint electronically matches single stocks and portfolios of stocks at predetermined times during the day and after-hours.

"NYSE MatchPoint is a major step forward in our broad initiative to provide investors with a choice of how to transact trades at the New York Stock Exchange," Lawrence Leibowitz, NYSE Euronext's head of U.S. products, said in a statement.