Turquoise Plato Block Discovery has set a new record as large in scale (LIS) trading activity continues to gain significant ground over dark pool trading in the wake of MiFID II.
Daily value traded on the service reached €575 million on 11 January, up 25% from the previous record set last year.
Robert Barnes, CEO at Turquoise, told The TRADE with little over a week prior to MiFID II’s implementation “an increasing number of firms are consistently trading in larger blocks than ever before, while continuing to access multiple European markets via a single connection to Turquoise Plato”.
LIS activity has increased across block trading venues since MiFID II came into effect on 3 January. Statistics from Fidessa recently revealed the proportion of dark traded as LIS blocks reached a record 28.7% on 12 January, compared to 22.5% in November last year.
Fidessa’s statistics also showed Turquoise Plato executed more trades over the €650,000 threshold last week than any other block trading venue.
For that week, Liquidnet executed 298 trades closely followed by Cboe LIS which executed 292, but Turquoise Plato saw a trade count of 538.
Last year, TABB Group estimated the block trading market on European dark pools to be worth around €100 billion and multiple new LIS venues entered the market in a bid to win market share.
“Behaviour is evolving in order to embrace the new regulatory landscape by trading blocks that are above LIS. As this ecosystem evolves, we expect the demand for electronic block trading to continue to grow,” Barnes told The TRADE in December last year.
For an in-depth look at whether recently established block trading venues are exacerbating fragmentation and which venues are coming out on top, click here.