EXCHANGE NEWSWIRE, 20 June 2011
BATS Global’s acquisition of Chi-X Europe has been referred by the UK’s Office of Fair Trading (OFT) to the Competition Commission for further investigation to “determine whether a substantial lessening of competition is probable”. A statement by the OFT said that the combination of Chi-X Europe and BATS Europe would reduce the number of trading venues for UK equities, and continued individual operation of both venues would make them compete “more strongly against each other”.
RTS and Micex plan to sign a merger agreement this week, according to the Financial Times. RTS will take a 20% stake in the combined entity, which is set to be valued at $5b - $6b. The new entity also aims to launch an IPO as soon as 2012. This is an effort to boost trading volumes on Moscow’s illiquid stock market and transform Moscow into an international financial center by 2020.
LSE will extend its high-volume liquidity taker promotion till September, which charges traders 0.29 bps for aggressive executions during continuous trading in equities and international order book securities. LSE’s liquidity provider scheme for FTSE 350 stocks will also be extended until March 31, 2012, waiving fees for members providing liquidity in the FTSE 350 index.
ICE Futures Europe will start publishing weekly Commitments of Traders (COT) reports for its global benchmark ICE Brent Crude and ICE Gasoil futures contracts today. This makes it the first European exchange to publish reports to increase market transparency and lead development of comprehensive reporting across regulatory jurisdictions.
NYX’s new MTF, NYSE BondMatch, received regulatory authorization and will start trading on July 11. The MTF platform allows professional traders to trade more than 1,800 international corporate, financial and covered bonds on a transparent order book with firm orders.
NYX’s European equities, bonds and ETFs markets experienced technical problems which caused outages on its Paris, Amsterdam, Lisbon and Brussels exchanges Monday morning, resulting in a delayed “opening of the continuous trading session”.
Chi-X Australia will use ASX’s clearing and settlement service in a five-year deal. According to the “commercial terms” of the deal, ASX will charge an initial fee of A$10,000 for access application and an annual service fee of A$275,000 for use of “its trade acceptance service” (TAS).
Alpha Group launched its Alpha IntraSpread dark pool, which is aimed at market participants seeking refuge from HFT’s impact on Canada’s lit markets. The platform promises “guaranteed price improvement” compared to the national best bid and offer, and also seeks to maximize trade sizes by prioritizing dark orders which can match the full size of the incoming order. Only retail order flow may trade aggressively in the dark pool, and institutional orders must rest passively. Its fees are priced at C$0.0004 per share for securities C$1 and above, and C$0.0001 per share for securities with a value below C$1.
DTCC proposed to partner Swift in response to a request for proposal from the Association for Financial Markets in Europe (Afme) “to build a trade repository for foreign exchange”. DTCC also stated that it believes “we have a design that can support multiple asset classes”.
ICE was upgraded to “Buy” from “Hold” at Jefferies. Target price was raised to $145 from $130.
Provided By: Equity Research Desk, www.erdesk.com
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