Instinet Incorporated, a global leader in electronic trading and agency-only brokerage services, today announced that its Instinet Europe Limited subsidiary has completed the transition to three new matching points-EBBO Bid, EBBO Mid and EBBO Offer-for its BlockMatch dark MTF.
As a result, BlockMatch now comprises three discrete order books, with pricing for each derived from Instinet's Consolidated EBBO feed. Currently, the majority of dark MTFs reference only the pricing of a security's listing exchange when setting pricing levels. However, this provides an increasingly incomplete snapshot, as large percentages of many securities' turnover trades on displayed MTFs.
"The incorporation of EBBO functionality to BlockMatch marks an important step in the evolution of European market structure, as the lack of consolidated, pan-European reference data has been a frustration of many market participants," said Richard Balarkas, President and Chief Executive Officer of Instinet Europe. "We are pleased to be able to leverage Instinet's market leading technology platform to provide clients the opportunity to more accurately trade at various benchmarks and, ultimately, improve execution quality."
BlockMatch has been registered as an MTF with the FSA since 2007 and was the first broker-operated dark pool to be designated as such. Access to the platform is available to both the buyside and sellside through Instinet's Newport® 3 EMS, the Execution Experts® algorithms, its European SmartRouter, multiple third party trading systems or direct FIX connection. For more information, please visit www.blockmatch.com.