Instinet Europe Limited, the European agency brokerage subsidiary of electronic trading and agency-only brokerage services leader Instinet Incorporated, today published the key findings of its Best Execution Policy Review, conducted in accordance with MiFID regulations. The review covers Instinet Europe’s trading performance from 1 May 2008 through to 31 July 2008 (months 7-9 of MiFID) and follows the firm’s published findings of its execution quality from MiFID’s first six months in June.
The key findings are as follows:- Instinet Europe’s SmartRouter™ has been enhanced to interact with new trading venues as they have been introduced. The average price improvement1 when trading on new venues was 5.32 bps for the three month measurement period, and consistently improved month over month, rising to 6.43 bps in July 2008 compared with an initial 1.73 bps in November 2007, when MiFID was introduced.
- Of the shares traded away from the primary markets on alternative trading venues, Instinet Europe’s clients received price improvement 54.2 percent of the time (by value traded) and executed at the same price or better than found on the primary markets 96.0 percent of the time.
- By value traded, Instinet Europe executions away from the primary markets in UK, French, German and Dutch equities increased to 32.5 percent in July 2008 from 26.4 percent in May 2008. For UK equities alone, Instinet Europe in July 2008 executed 43.5 percent of its volume away from the London Stock Exchange, compared with 37.0 percent in May 2008.
- Instinet Europe has connected to and is successfully trading on both Turquoise and SWX Swiss Block, the two new multi-lateral trading facilities to have launched in August. Instinet Europe also became a direct member of the NYSE Euronext Lisbon Stock Exchange in August. During the review period, Instinet went live with the BlockMatch™ MTF, Instinet’s European block crossing platform, and announced a bilateral agreement with Credit Suisse to provide mutual access to each others’ dark pools. Additionally, Instinet Europe expects to continue to link to new liquidity pools as they become available, including BATS Europe, NASDAQ OMX Europe, NYSE Euronext’s SmartPool.
- Although not within the scope of MiFID, Instinet’s execution performance in US shares remains strong. In Investment Technology Group, Inc.’s (ITG®) recently published ITG Broker Edge™ report, which covered the four-quarter period ended 31 March, 2008, Instinet was ranked first for execution quality in overall US stock trading and #1 in nine out of the 14 ITG Broker Edge trading categories, as measured by value-added2.
“We believe that emerging pools of liquidity offer tremendous opportunities for price improvement. In our last review period we reported average savings of 3.08 basis points for our clients, and by delivering on our promise to link our clients to each and every liquidity pool to which we are allowed access, we have seen this figure rise to 6.43 basis points in July 2008,” commented Instinet Europe CEO Richard Balarkas on the findings of the review.
He continued: “As an agency-only broker our sole aim is to hunt out the best possible execution opportunities for our clients. With the continual refinement of our sophisticated smart order router and commitment to connect to new liquidity venues, we only expect to see this average savings figure rise further given the wave of new entrants expected over the coming months.”
1Price improvement is defined as the difference between execution price and the best quoted price on the primary exchange at that time. Measurement is based on Instinet Europe Limited's review of all IEL trade executions between 1 November 2007 and 31 July 2008, and does not represent an independent review of execution performance.
2 “Value-added” is defined as the total trade cost minus ITG Broker Edge’s difficulty-adjusted benchmark, called PAEG/LSM. This is the average experience benchmark for each trade based on statistical equations. The total trade cost is defined as the average difference between execution price and market price at the time the order was released to the broker. Higher value added means greater the cost savings and better execution quality.
