The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has deemed only 220 bonds to be sufficiently liquid to be subject to MiFID II’s real-time transparency requirements.
The bonds were discovered in the regulator’s first assessment of the European bond market for the first quarter of 2018.
ESMA added however, that the data received so far is “not fully complete” for most instruments.
The data “completeness and quality issues” therefore led to a lower number compared to ESMA’s earlier transitional transparency calculations.
The liquidity assessment for bonds relates to those subject to the pre- and post-trade requirements under MiFID II.
ESMA published the list on its website under a Financial Instruments Transparency System (FITRS).
The European watchdog said its liquidity assessment for bonds is based on a quarterly assessment of quantitative liquidity criteria, such as the daily average trading activity and number of days traded per quarter.