Deutsche Börse Xetra has further expanded its retail offering with a new ETF trading service.
Launched in March, the new service is designed to offer automatic price improvement over Xetra reference market prices.
Retail orders are integrated with institutional ones within the Xetra order book, however, central to the new offering launched in March is are retail-dedicated market makers designed to interact specifically with retail orders, with the aim of provides providing price improvement over the prevailing Xetra best bid and offer (BBO) prices when possible.
If this cannot be achieved, then orders are executed at least at the current Xetra price.
“Given the recent surge of retail investor activity in Germany and other European countries, our new retail execution service addresses the growing demand for efficient capital market access at the right time,” a Deutsche Börse spokesperson told The TRADE.
“This service represents an important milestone in our ongoing efforts to deliver first-class execution services specifically tailored to the needs of retail clients. It will also serve as a launching pad for further innovation in the future.”
Transaction fees for retail executions have been reduced by Xetra, subject to the investor’s bank or broker participating in the service. The service applies to all Xetra trading in equities, ETFs and ETPs.
It is supplemented by a free real-time Level 2 market data offering for ETFs and ETPs, launched in April. Registered private investors have access to Xetra ETF real-time push price data. The new retail data offering also includes real-time order book depth data of all ETFs and ETPs traded on Xetra.
The market data offering is also available to institutions for integration into their services, a spokesperson for Deutsche Börse confirmed.
The new ETF retail trading offering builds on the equities service launched by Xetra last year.
“With our new execution service, we aim to reduce both implicit and explicit execution costs for private investors, ensuring best execution in equities – including German, European and a broad range of foreign stocks – as well as ETFs and ETPs,” a spokesperson for the exchange said.