BlocSec, an electronic non-displayed trading venue for Asian equities owned by agency brokerage CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets, has started offering offshsore trading in Australian equities, taking the number of markets it covers in the region to four.
Buy- and sell-side participants based outside Australia will be able to use BlocSec to trade large blocks of Australian stocks anonymously, reducing the chance of market impact. Other markets served by BlocSec are Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore.
“There is high demand for dark pools in this market and by adding Australia it reaffirms our commitment to being the leading dark pool in the Asia-Pacific region,” said BlocSec CEO Ned Phillips, in a statement.
BlocSec launched in Japan and Singapore in May 2008, and added the Hong Kong market in August 2008. It has become the third independent dark pool to offer trading in Australian equities, along with Liquidnet and ITG POSIT.
“The addition of Australia has been anticipated by our community of dark pool users for some time. It provides them greater flexibility to move in and out of large Australian equity positions without signaling their activities to the market,” added Phillip Van Dine, head of sales BlocSec.
BlocSec has a minimum order size of US$250,000, which it revised downwards from US$1 million in May in response to dwindling block sizes in the Asia-Pacific region. This followed an adjustment in December last year under which the platform started accepting order sizes of above 20% of a stock’s average daily volume if lower than the US$1 million threshold.