NYSE Arca Europe, a displayed pan-European multilateral trading facility (MTF) created by exchange group NYSE Euronext, started trading today and will offer free trading until April as part of a three-week-long launch promotion. However, unlike other pan-European MTFs, it will charge both for posting and taking liquidity.
The platform, whose launch was delayed twice last year because of a lack of client readiness, will enter a phased launch from today and will offer European stocks that are not already available on Euronext’s regulated cash markets in Portugal, Belgium, France and the Netherlands.
From today, the platform will trade stocks from Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. A second phase, planned for early April, will include UK and Irish stocks.
After 1 April, when the pricing promotion ends, NYSE Arca Europe will become the only displayed MTF without a maker-taker pricing model. It will charge 0.15 basis points for both passive and aggressive orders. Other similar platforms charge for aggressive executions but pay rebates for passive executions.
In addition, trading on NYSE Arca Europe will qualify members for discounts when executing on NYSE Euronext’s regulated markets. A trader executing a certain amount on the new MTF will be able to trade an equivalent amount on the regulated markets at a 0.15 bps rate charge for passive executions and 0.25 bps for aggressive executions.
For example, someone who traded 1 billion shares on NYSE Arca Europe will pay 0.15 bps for passive orders and 0.25 bps for aggressive orders on the first billion shares executed on other Euronext markets.
The platform can be accessed via NYSE Euronext’s Universal Trading Platform (UTP), the exchange group’s single point of access and trading system for its cash and derivatives markets. According to NYSE Euronext, UTP delivers latency of between 150-400 microseconds and has the capacity to handle 100,000 orders per second.
Like other MTFs, NYSE Arca Europe will trade from 09.00 until 17.30 central European time. Central counterparty (CCP) services will be provided by EuroCCP, which currently clears for broker-backed MTF Turquoise. The platform has also detailed its intentions to add European Multilateral Clearing Facility – now owned by the Dutch government and Nasdaq OMX – LCH.Clearnet and Swiss clearer SIX X-clear to its list of CCPs.
“NYSE Arca Europe is a strategically important initiative for us in Europe as we continue to expand our service offerings in the new European market environment,” said Roland Bellegarde, group executive vice president and head of European execution for NYSE Euronext, in a statement. “Our customers will now have access, through one single trading platform, to our highly liquid regulated markets, to SmartPool, our dark pool block-trading facility, and, from today, to a much wider range of blue-chip pan-European stocks via NYSE Arca Europe.”