BT AND AT&T strengthened their positions in Canada's pounds 10bn telecommunications market yesterday with two joint venture deals. Mr Williamson in his thinking is light years ahead not just of most other futures exchanges but of our dear old stock exchange as well.. The most interesting aspect of yesterday's tie-up with the CME is the joint venture the two are setting up as a vehicle to develop new products and services with other partners, who can be technology providers, other exchanges or users. There is nothing to stop the venture becoming the basis for a global network for trading in shares, bonds, foreign exchange as well as derivatives, elbowing its way into the traditional preserve of other exchanges. The big trading houses are giving up on the exchanges altogether and either setting up their own parallel dealing systems like E-Cross Net, the share-crossing system launched by Barclays and Mercury Asset Management last week, or backing commercial alternatives like Instinet.Mr Williamson's reckons that the answer is not to try and stamp out these alternative dealing networks but to become one. The Merc, meanwhile, reigns supreme in the short-term eurodollar market.

Customers want to trade round the globe and Liffe, if it is to survive, has to make the most of its pivotal position between the dollar and euro blocks.But there is more to yesterday's deal than that. Although Liffe has lost the flagship bund contract and its successor at the long end of the euro futures market, it leads on Euribor, the short end of euro. Yet there he was cosying up by satellite link to Scott Gordon of the Merc. The truth is that this was an opportunity that was too good to miss. In announcing yesterday's link-up with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Brian Williamson, the chairman of Liffe, London's embattled futures exchange, knew full well that it would be construed in some quarters as a panic reaction to the Chicago Board of Trade's link-up with Liffe's arch-rival Eurex. After all, hasn't Mr Williamson repeatedly said since returning to lead Liffe's fight back last year that he does not believe in traditional alliances. WHEN IS an alliance not an alliance? When it is a strategic partnership.

Unless Mr Smith comes up with more radical surgery, perhaps even a break-up of the group starting with the Tom Cobleigh pubs chain and nightclubs, then investors are destined to remain on the same diet of thin rations.. He is determined not to repeat the mistakes of the previous chief executive, Andrew Teare, who bet everything on one last desperate punt and ended up losing his job and very nearly the ranch.Mr Smith has made a start by stopping cash bleeding from the group, beginning with the dividend, and targetting better returns.But the root of Rank's problem is that it is stuck with a bunch of businesses that are generally low growth, cash-hungry and under siege from better- run competitors.That is why Rank has underperformed the market by 60 per cent in the last three years and fallen out of the Footsie. Butlins alone has soaked up pounds 140m in a bid to shed its Hi-Di-Hi image and become a wannabe Center ParcComing as he does from a background in the betting industry, Mr Smith knows all about the dangers of throwing good money after bad. The group's complicated history of buying and selling has left it with a ragbag of businesses ranging from Odeon cinemas, Butlins holiday camps and bingo halls to film processing, pub restaurants and casinos.Does Rank understand its markets or is the identikit customer a Japanese tourist wandering around around Hyde Park Corner with a knotted hankie on his head and a camcorder over his shoulder unable to find the flagship Hard Rock Cafe because it is covered in scaffolding?Worse still, the management has been spending cash like the proverbial man with no arms in one of Rank's amusement arcades.In the last three years, the group has consumed close on pounds 2bn of investment and returned just pounds 20m in additional operating profit. Why, then, did the market get that queasy feeling, like stepping off one of Rank's theme park rides, that the new broom has not swept quite clean enough? The problem is not so much that the individual businesses are badly run, though heaven knows there is room for improvement, but that there is no cohesion between the various moving parts.