The Luck of the Irish

Looks like it’s Ireland’s turn to run the gauntlet with the MTF community. Pretty much all the MTFs – Chi-X, BATS, NASDAQ OMX Europe and Turquoise – have announced that they will be trading Irish stocks from now on. For this reason we have now included the Irish Stock Exchange (ISE) and its accompanying index (ISEQ) on the FFI website. A quick look revealed that many Irish stocks are in fact traded on the LSE and so Dublin’s market share of its main index... Read More

The T Word

It was interesting to watch Andrew Bowley’s video interview on Finextra regarding the launch of Nomura’s dark pool – NX. It helped crystallise the love/hate relationship between dark pools and the T word – Transparency. Andrew Bowley made a good point about how the pursuit of MTF status for NX had been going on for a long time and wasn’t just a knee jerk reaction to the increasing regulatory pressure on the dark pool phenomenon. He also talked about how greater... Read More

Fragmentation Fever Goes East

Looks like 2010 is going to be a pretty interesting year in the battle for liquidity between the established exchanges and the more recently established MTFs and dark pools. It also looks like fragmentation fever is likely to spread eastward, too. This is being driven by a number of factors that include technology, regulation and commercial opportunism. The introduction this week of arrowhead by the Tokyo Stock Exchange will bring the performance of the TSE more in line with global... Read More