Yesterday, while looking at the PLUS Markets website I noticed that they are now advertising mobile phones and coffee makers.
(Check it out at http://www.plusmarketsgroup.com/PLUS_myplus.shtml).
When I wrote yesterday that the trading landscape was still to undergo fundamental change I didn’t think that alternative venues would be diversifying into the household goods market for a few more years yet. Anyway, thanks to PLUS, the Mrs and one of the boys are sorted for this year.
It did set me thinking though about how we should cover dark liquidity in the FFI as currently we only track trading on lit order books and ignore any OTC trades that are just reported to venues like PLUS. It is estimated that 35% of European and over 45% of UK liquidity is traded in this way and this will only rise as new dark venues (such as Liquidnet/H20, Pipeline and SmartPool) enter the fray early next year. Not sure if we can actually identify dark volume from OTC volume but should we just show a single off exchange market share or break it out by each reporting venue? Maybe we should ignore it altogether as this type of trading is different from lit trading on exchange?
