Patent ID: 7222089

Claim:
A method for facilitating an electronic transaction across a plurality of trade participants through a central controller, the central controller performing the steps of: registering a plurality of traders and recording for each an identification of business entity, a business profile and a plurality of business preferences to engage in a trade; registering a plurality of traders in a role of an intermediary who act transparently in a capacity of a buyer or a seller to facilitate the trade across a plurality of markets, and recording for each an identification of business entity, a business profile and a plurality of business preferences to engage in the trade; identifying for said registered traders a trading market comprised of a plurality of business entities with whom said traders do trading based on trading restrictions of said business preferences; receiving a trading proposal from an initiating one of the traders and recording for said proposal a trade specification comprised of a product specification, and a plurality of trading preferences; identifying a plurality of trading markets based on said trading proposal and said business preferences of initiating one of the traders by choosing selected ones of said traders having trading preferences compatible with the initiating one of the traders; developing a plurality of trading markets by choosing additionally correlated ones of said traders in the role of intermediary having trading preferences compatible with said proposal of the initiating one or the selected ones of said traders, the trading markets being interconnected by at least two intermediaries in order to form a network of interconnected markets having an increased scope in comparison to individual ones of the trading markets; presenting information about the trading proposal dynamically to said traders selected for compatibility with the trading preferences compatible with the initiating one and the selected ones of said traders in a plurality of said identification steps before acceptance of a finalized transaction based on the trading proposal of the initiating one of the traders; and receiving an acceptance or a counter-trading proposal from selected ones of said traders by means of recording dynamic routing information based on the plurality of said identification and information presentation steps; permitting the traders in the role of an intermediary from the interconnected markets to anonymously collect compensation on the products based at least in part on one or more quotes circulating between the initiating one of the traders and another one of the traders.