Liquidnet, the premier institutional investment community, announced that from today its Members will be able to trade equities in Poland using its platform. Liquidnet is the first Multilateral Trading Facility (MTF) to offer trading in Polish equities. With this addition, Liquidnet now trades in 31 equity markets across five continents, plus London- and Luxembourg-list GDRs.
John Barker, Head of International for Liquidnet, said “Offering our Members equities trading in Poland further enhances our strong presence in Central and Eastern European markets. Poland is Central Europe’s biggest and most liquid market, with high levels of domestic investment and relatively low volatility. As the EU’s sixth largest economy and the only one to avoid a recession, the Polish equity market, backed by improved earnings, a strong zloty, and solid macroeconomics, is highly attractive to international investors. We expect Polish trading volumes to add to the €43 billion of average daily liquidity our Members had access to globally in Q4.”
“As the premier institutional investment community, we aim to bring the buy-side as much institutional-sized, actionable liquidity as possible, whilst providing a secure and efficient environment in which to trade. We will continue to assess opportunities to offer trading in other global markets with several planned for launch later this year. This growth reinforces our position as Europe's number one block trading venue—particularly considering our average execution size of €1.13m in January 2010, which is the largest in the industry at over 115 times the size of the average LSE trade.” 1
The Warsaw Stock Exchange has a total capitalisation of around €168bn, with 377 listed companies covering a diverse range of industry sectors—primarily services and industrials. 2
Liquidnet has a particularly strong presence in emerging European markets. Along with Poland and Slovenia, which was launched late last year, Liquidnet also offers trading in Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, plus 18 other European markets.
