This development is the first of its kind in Europe and will enable European collective investment schemes (mutual funds) to more accurately value their Asian equity holdings. Fair valuation serves the dual purpose of preventing short-term traders (market timers) from exploiting the stale pricing of a fund's overseas holdings and also satisfies regulatory requirements.

Market timers generate enormous cash flows in and out of target funds, resulting in higher turnover and excessive transaction costs. In historical backtests of actual portfolios, the ITG FVM has significantly reduced the opportunity for market timing by generating price adjustments that assist clients to provide more reflective prices when they value their funds.

The ITG FVM for Europe will initially cover some 18,500 securities from 14 Asian markets. The calculations will be made accessible to fund managers at pre-arranged points in time during the course of the European trading day, initially at 16.00 and 17.30 CET. ITG FVM is an independent and reliable service and is characterised by a high level of co-operation with clients.

Commenting on the launch, Alasdair Haynes, CEO of ITG Europe, said: "We are very pleased to be able to extend this important service to our European clients. ITG is the leading provider of such third-party services in the US and today's move is a natural progression in our global business of developing tools and services that analyse, measure and cut costs across the trading continuum. Already we have early adopters and are confident that many more European fund managers will be keen to investigate and use this product."