Chart 1: Where European equities trade
[ T H O U G H T L E A D E R S H I P | C B O E E U R O P E ]
Providing a choice of trading mechanisms While lit order books remain essential to many trading strategies, we also understand that intermediaries or end investors have no single“ best” way to trade.
That’ s why, across our exchanges in the Netherlands and the UK, clients can choose the execution method that best meets their execution objectives- whether that’ s speed and certainty, block‐liquidity discovery, price improvement, information protection, or explicit cost optimisation. Our offering spans lit and dark order books, periodic auctions, Cboe BIDS Europe, Cboe BIDS VWAP‐X and Cboe Closing Cross.
Periodic auctions, a trading category that Cboe pioneered, continue to be rapidly adopted as venues that de-emphasise the benefits of speed, offer price improvement and minimise market impact. Having reached record levels already this year, we’ re keen to support further growth though better enabling trading across the spread range. We’ re also preparing to bring our latest innovation, Cboe BIDS VWAP-X- a venue-based trajectory crossing service- to the
EU, subject to regulatory approval.
Setting the standard in trade reporting Cboe Europe’ s trade reporting services enable firms to meet a wide range of business and regulatory requirements. Our approved publication arrangement( APA) provides a comprehensive and cost‐effective solution for fulfilling OTC reporting obligations and now accounts for the reporting of around 90 % of all OTC equities trades.
Through our Exchange-Trade Reporting( ETR) service, firms can report bilateral trades into an on-exchange, centrally cleared environment- supporting regulatory goals to move more trading on‐exchange and reducing counterparty risk by converting bilateral trades into CCP‐cleared transactions.
In our role as the largest equities APA, a key area of focus is working with the industry to further improve OTC market data quality. We’ ll also be introducing a new service to help systematic internalisers prepare for the delayed‐quote publication requirements coming into force in August 2026.
Continuing to advocate for better markets We’ ve long been a strong voice in shaping European market structure, championing initiatives and reforms that put issuers and end investors first- from competitive clearing to real-time pre- and post-trade consolidated tapes for equities. We remain relentlessly focused on improving European markets and promoting transparency to lower barriers to investing and grow European markets. In particular, the industry needs to reframe how it thinks about liquidity as alternative trading mechanisms have grown. Focusing only on CLOBs understates the true European liquidity picture; instead benchmarks should reflect liquidity across CLOBs, midpoint books, periodic auctions, electronic block trading platforms, and certain off‐book executions.
As the EU moves toward finalising its capital‐markets integration package, we will continue to call for mandated CCP interoperability across all major cash‐equities exchanges and for regulation that protects the ability of exchanges to innovate and compete effectively.
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