The TRADE 58 | Page 46

[ T H O U G H T L E A D E R S H I P ] For midpoint & blocks, add Turquoise Investors benefit using Turquoise Lit and Turquoise Plato innovations. W hen 900 electronic trading experts of FIX Trading Community gathered from 22 countries at the 2016 EMEA Trad- ing Conference in London, they were asked their opinion about the European trading landscape in 2018 post MiFID II. More than half the audience, 51%, said they expected in 2018 “More electronic Block Trading”. With the next question, it was our privilege to see distinguished practitioners clearly express their independent opinion that Tur- quoise was their preferred venue for order book innovation. Fast forward to end of Novem- ber 2018, and customers using Turquoise Plato Block Discovery™ have traded more than ¤150 billion – more than any other provider as a fully automated service without the fading associated with manual firm up models. The insight is that Electronic Block Trading at midpoint works and Turquoise is fully adopted by the global investor community, ready to scale beyond UK and European markets. The puzzle facing exchanges worldwide is that electronic order books shrink trade size. A large order matching against small 46 // TheTrade // Winter 2018 orders leads to small trades – and published data shows that Euro- pean exchange order books have shrunk and converged to an aver- age of around ¤10,000 per trade. Why does this matter? Because institutional investors such as asset managers, pension funds and in- surance companies handling large trades – ultimately on behalf of end investors – will suffer stronger neg- ative market impact and signalling risk in such an environment. Working together for years with buyside and sell-side Turquoise designed and refined a multilateral model where the average trade size of electronic block trading on Turquoise midpoint order book has grown for blue chips to more than ¤1m per trade via Turquoise Plato Block Discovery™. This is 100x larger than the average trade size of ¤0.01m per trade. Behaviour continues to evolve positively with buy-side dealers sending larger fully electronic orders into Turquoise Plato Block Discovery™ for industry leading high rates of automatic firm up into the uniquely designed Turquoise Plato Uncross™ – the high-quality execution destination featuring low price reversion after a trade. By 2016, investors could find a single electronic block execution per stock per day on the scale of single digit millions of Euros per trade. Today in 2018, investors using Turquoise Plato Block Discovery™ are more likely to match multiple big trades per stock in one day, now this service has grown with a significant user base and become the leading electronic block and quality midpoint trading venue in