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Could Hurricane Betting Make You Money?

Online Trading Platform Lets You Place Bets on Hurricane Landfall

August 30, 2010, ABC News — Want to make a buck betting on where the wind blows?

If entrepreneur Kenneth Horowitz has his way, you could be doing just that as early as next summer.

His new online trading platform lets people place bets on where hurricanes, like Hurricanes Danielle or Earl, make landfall.

Traders buy and sell Hurricane Risk Landfall Options (or HuRLOs) that represented different regions of the hurricane-prone Atlantic and Gulf coasts. If a hurricane hits land in the region that corresponds to your option, you split the payout with others who make the same winning bet...

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Betting on how a hurricane blows

August 27, 2010, The Boston Globe — For the past week, many in New England and along the Eastern Seaboard have been watching as Hurricane Danielle churned slowly northward in the Atlantic. As soon as next year, some of these watchers could be putting money down on their predictions of where a hurricane like Danielle will make landfall.

The financial product they could use is the Hurricane Risk Landfall Option, or Hurlo, which was created by Ken Horowitz, who made his fortune as a cofounder of Celluar One, one of the first mobile telephone networks — later known to Boston-area customers as Cingular Wireless....

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International Securities Exchange and Weather Risk Solutions Announce Strategic Agreement

NEW YORK, August 4, 2009 - The International Securities Exchange (ISE) and Weather Risk Solutions, LLC (WRS), the developer of Hurricane Risk Landfall Options (HuRLOTM), today announced that they have entered into a strategic agreement. ISE will receive a minority interest in WRS in return for granting WRS the right to use ISE's proprietary Longitude technology.

WRS's trading platform and ISE's Longitude technology use mutualized risk-sharing principles to aggregate liquidity and produce fair and efficient market-driven prices to enable commodity options trading in events and occurrences that do not have an underlying cash market. WRS's HuRLOs are commodity options that enable individuals and businesses to hedge against financial risks resulting from hurricane landfalls in an open, dynamic and transparent financial market. HuRLOs are available to eligible contract participants and are traded through WRS's Internet-based electronic trading platform and cleared by CME Clearing House, a subsidiary of Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Inc.

Kenneth Horowitz, founder of WRS, said, "Our new strategic relationship with ISE will support the next phase of WRS's growth and we look forward to leveraging ISE's innovative Longitude technology. We are very pleased that ISE has recognized the potential of our unique offering which provides a simple way for market participants to hedge against or speculate on the risk that a hurricane will first make landfall on a selected county or region on the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts."

Thomas Ascher, ISE's Chief Strategy Officer, said, "ISE is excited to partner with WRS and to gain a minority stake in such an innovative organization. Through this agreement, we are well poised to benefit from future growth in this untapped segment of the commodity options market."

About ISE

The International Securities Exchange (ISE) operates the world's largest equity options exchange and offers options trading on over 2,000 underlying equity, ETF, index, and FX products. As the first all-electronic options exchange in the U.S., ISE transformed the options industry by creating efficient markets through innovative market structure and technology. Regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and a member-owner of The Options Clearing Corporation (OCC), ISE provides investors with a transparent marketplace for price and liquidity discovery on centrally cleared options products. ISE continues to expand its marketplace through the ongoing development of enhanced trading functionality, new products, and market data services. As a complement to its options business, ISE has expanded its reach into multiple asset classes through strategic investments in financial marketplaces that foster technology innovation and market efficiency. Through minority investments, ISE participates in the securities lending and equities markets.

ISE is a wholly owned subsidiary of Eurex, a leading global derivatives exchange. Eurex itself is jointly owned by Deutsche Börse AG (Ticker: DB1) and SIX Swiss Exchange AG. Together, Eurex and ISE are the global market leader in individual equity and equity index derivatives. For more information, visit www.ise.com.

About Weather Risk Solutions, LLC

Founded in 2002, Kenneth A. Horowitz, along with a group of experts in atmospheric sciences, including former staff of the National Hurricane Center and leading financial and economic mathematicians, developed Hurricane Risk Landfall Options - HuRLOTM - which allow market participants to hedge against or speculate on the financial risk that a selected coastal county or region on the U.S. coast will be the first hit by a hurricane. HuRLOs are traded through the WRS Electronic Trading PlatformTM (www.HuRLOs.com), an innovative Internet-based electronic trading platform that provides pricing for individual HuRLOs, which are based on the buying decisions of market participants. The dynamic and comprehensive site also offers weather information from the National Hurricane Center, the Weather Channel, AccuWeather and Weather Underground.