Chi-X™ Canada ATS Limited, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Instinet Incorporated and operator of Chi-X Canada, today announced it traded a record 5.5 million shares on September 16, and over the last week has averaged over 4.5 million shares per day in trading volume. Additionally, the ATS recently added its 37th member participant, a group which includes 27 of Canada’s 30 largest brokers, and has also partnered with Canada’s largest connectivity (BT Radianz, Savvis, TNS), market data (Bloomberg, Datalinx, Thomson Reuters) and order entry (Belzberg, FlexTrade, Fidessa, IRESS, ITS, Orc Trading, Nexa) vendors since launching in late February.
“Our trading volumes have steadily increased since our launch. With the mix of participants connected, we are regularly the market’s leading ATS in terms of notional value, number of trades and number of names traded, and are consistently trading between 10-15 percent of the overall daily volume of certain S&P/TSX 60 names such as Nexen, Cameco and Petro Canada,” said Tal Cohen, CEO of Chi-X Canada*. “Additionally, with trades on Chi-X Canada regularly realizing price improvement as compared to the primary exchange due to our unique offering of pegged and hidden order types, those brokers who are not connected will soon need to revisit their best execution policies.”
Mr. Cohen continued: “While we realize that competition in the Canadian equity trading markets will no doubt intensify over the coming months, we believe that we are well positioned given our system’s speed and capacity, pricing, feature set and our experience running marketplaces in Europe and the U.S.”
System Performance
Chi-X Canada’s internal latency has been measured to be 890 microseconds, or less than one millisecond (1/1,000th of a second), and its capacity is 30,000 messages/second. Based on available data, it is believed that Chi-X Canada’s system is currently the fastest and its capacity the greatest of any system operating in the Canadian market.
Pricing
Chi-X Canada charges the lowest fee in the market to access liquidity and rebates per share for providing liquidity. Additionally, there are no charges for market data, testing, order cancelations or modifications, or failure to reach certain volume levels, for which other Canadian market centres charge.
Unique Feature Set Chi-X Canada is the only market centre in Canada to offer the following services:
- A fully anonymous market that is based on strict price/time priority, which differs from other Canadian market centres where broker code “01” (the “anonymous” broker code) is disadvantaged in the execution queue;
- Support for a wide array of unique order types in the Canadian market, such as pegged, hidden and CSO (Chi-X Sweep Order), which are particularly attractive to algorithmic traders;
- Smart order routing, which Chi-X Canada offers to subscribers for no fee;
- Intelligent Order Book™, which prevents trade through and quote through.
Experience
Chi-X® Europe, which is based on the same technology and market model, currently trades upwards of 20% of the FTSE 100 daily turnover. Additionally, Instinet, Chi-X Canada’s parent, has long been recognized as a trading pioneer, having operated the U.S. market’s largest ECN (INET, from 2002
