Instinet Incorporated, a global leader in electronic trading and agency-only brokerage services, today announced that its European agency brokerage subsidiary, Instinet Europe Limited (IEL), has published the key findings of its Best Execution Policy Review for 2008.
The key findings are as follows (full results below):
- Instinet Europe's SmartRouter has been enhanced throughout the year to interact with new trading venues as they have been introduced. As a result, the average price improvement when trading on new venues in 2008 was 5.08 bps.
- Of the shares traded away from the primary markets on alternative trading venues, Instinet Europe's clients received price improvement 52.49 percent of the time (by value traded) and executed at the same price or better than found on the primary markets 95.67 percent of the time.
- By value traded, 30.54 percent of Instinet Europe executions were traded away from the primary markets in UK, French, German and Dutch stocks. For UK equities alone, Instinet Europe executed 38.05 percent of its volume away from the London Stock Exchange.
Throughout the year, Instinet Europe's SmartRouter was among the first - if not the first - to be connected to each of the new MTFs, including BATS Europe, NASDAQ OMX Europe, NYFIX Euro Millennium and Turquoise, from day one. In addition, Instinet in 2008 executed the first trade on SWX Swiss Block, launched its own MTF, BlockMatch, and along with Credit Suisse became the first broker in Europe to offer reciprocal access to another's dark pool. Instinet continued this trend in 2009 by connecting to SmartPool from its launch, and expects to continue to connect to other new liquidity pools, including NYSE Arca Europe, as they become available.
Commenting on the findings of the firm's 2008 Best Execution Policy Review, Richard Balarkas, CEO of Instinet Europe, said, "We believe that both the new and emerging pools of liquidity offer tremendous opportunities for price improvement. We reported average savings of 5.08 bps for our clients during the year, in large part by delivering on our promise to link our clients to each and every liquidity pool to which we are allowed access, and this approach has allowed Instinet to pass on these savings to our clients.
He continued: "As an agency-only broker, our sole aim is to hunt out the best possible execution opportunities for our clients with the continual refinement of our sophisticated smart order router and commitment to connect to new liquidity venues. Whatever the year may bring for the MTFs, we are confident that our smart order router will continue to seek out the best possible executions for our clients."