Trading on Turquoise's pan-European mid-point dark pool reached record levels yesterday, with trading exceeding €200 million for the first time, making Turquoise the second largest MTF dark pool in Europe, considerably ahead of BATS Europe and SmartPool.
In total €210.7 million worth of trading was carried out on Turquoise's dark book yesterday, while the total value traded on Turquoise reached over €2bn.
Turquoise's dark book benefits from a strong institutional mix of liquidity in its dark pool. Average order and trade sizes are larger than in lit order books, and Turquoise has avoided order types that might enable information leakage or expose participants to adverse selection.
David Lester, CEO of Turquoise, said: "We believe our mid-point pool is currently highly differentiated from the other pan-European dark pools due to the high proportion of institutional order flow. We want to grow our midpoint book and attract more customers in a manner that preserves our differentiated position. Clients tell us they see lower ‘toxicity' of liquidity in our pool, and that this matters to them. We have further plans to encourage larger orders and trades, and look forward to working with our clients on these enhancements."
Turquoise welcomed two new active participants to its Midpoint book in the last week, both bringing agency institutional order flow; and expects to add several more participants in the coming weeks.
David Lester added: "We want to significantly grow volumes in both lit and dark trading, and these figures show we are clearly moving in the right direction. We will continue to focus on the needs of the market, and our clients, and work with them to ensure we continue to innovate and offer new products and services, as our recent roll-out of US equities shows."
"Turquoise will further differentiate itself from the competition later this year when we migrate to our new trading platform, Millennium Exchange. In addition to delivering superior technical performance and enhanced functionality for our integrated and midpoint books, our clients will realise synergies from the close similarity of the Turquoise interfaces to the new London Stock Exchange system. Additionally, clients will enjoy lower latency and lower connectivity and co-location costs through the system being located in the Group's London datacentre, alongside the London Stock Exchange platform, right in the heart of the City."
