Equiduct Trading's best price (VBBO) has passed its first test. From a technical point of view there are now no more barriers to trading. Since the start of April, the VBBO (Volume weighted Best Bid and Offer) has been published in real time for some 300 of the most liquid European securities on the Web portal of Börse Berlin Equiduct Trading. In due course, the calculation of the VBBO will be extended to cover all liquid securities. The VBBO will be made available as the best price solely for information purposes until trading actually begins in the middle of the year. For purposes of public dissemination, the VBBO will be calculated for both the Standard Market Size (SMS) and also the Retail Market Size (RMS). The VBBO will become a binding execution price with the start of trading, when it will be calculated on the basis of actual order volumes.
The VBBO is the gateway to pan-European security prices. As the mathematically calculated best price, the VBBO corresponds to the price that investors would receive with ideal partial executions in all key reference markets. The VBBO is based on the visible prices (Level 2) at two or more external reference markets. All securities covered by the VBBO must correspond to the Equiduct liquidity criteria, which are updated regularly.
Since being made public in April 2008, the VBBO is calculated for the most liquid shares traded on the London Stock Exchange, NYSE Euronext's European markets, and Deutsche Börse (Xetra). It is determined by a virtual order book which bundles together all visible pre-trade information and calculates a real-time best price for any given order size. On the Web site of Börse Berlin Equiduct Trading, the real-time information is available free of charge. For market participants of Equiduct Trading who use the PartnerEx functionality as of the live date, the VBBO is the best price available on the market at which they can then actually trade. With the VBBO, the participants gain a clear advantage on the European market. "Only the practical implementation shows whether a technical process will operate smoothly in every respect. And the start of this first stage of the launch of our market, making the VBBO available in real time, went without a hitch. From a technical point of view we can already be very satisfied. With this information we can demonstrate to the market participants the advantages they have when they trade with us and use the VBBO as their execution price ", commented Artur Fischer, Chairman of Börse Berlin Equiduct Trading.