Trading Venues

Oslo Connect, the multilateral trading facility for over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives operated by Oslo Børs, has started trading today.

A consortium of independent US broker-dealers, Mahogany Partners, has asked agency broker and technology provider ConvergEx to build a suite of electronic trading products to enhance its members’ block trading capabilities.

The order book segment of the London Stock Exchange’s Baikal non-displayed trading and liquidity aggregation service will launch as expected in November despite the exchange’s merger discussions with multilateral trading facility Turquoise.

Europe’s sponsored access market has no shortage of suppliers, but demand for the service is being hampered by a lack of consistency on how it differs from standard direct market access and where responsibility lies for risk controls.

Barclays Capital, the investment banking division of Barclays Bank, has taken a minority stake in Tradeweb, a provider of online electronic trading marketplaces for fixed income, derivatives and equities.

RTS Realtime Systems Group, a trading technology firm, has teamed up with connectivity provider Fixnetix to provide low-latency access to European equity and derivatives markets.

The London Stock Exchange and pan-European multilateral trading facilities (MTFs) Chi-X Europe, Nasdaq OMX Europe, BATS Europe and Turquoise have agreed on a list of 12 FTSE 100 stocks that will trade with finer tick sizes on their respective platforms.

Following a slump in trade volumes and turnover across Europe in the first quarter of this year, both value traded and number of transactions have risen in the second quarter. However, values still fall short of the levels seen in last year’s fourth quarter, when the financial crisis hit.

Order types that briefly display unfilled marketable orders to a trading venue’s members before routing them elsewhere can benefit the buy-side, but there are also potential dangers inherent in their use, industry experts suggest.

Direct Edge has fuelled the price war among US equity trading venues by offering rebates to liquidity providers from 1 July.