The Tradetech Daily

ICAP

ICAP

Contact
David LettonEmail: david.letton@icap.comTel: +44 (0)20 7532 4168

BlockCross is a pan- European multilateral trading facility (MTF) designed to help find natural liquidity and anonymously execute block trades directly with other participants, minimising market impact.

Functionality and order types

BlockCross executes orders with time priority, using the midpoint of the primary exchange as a reference. Participants can generate trading opportunities by sending non-binding, pre-trade alerts to a targeted audience. By offering total control over information, BlockCross protects participants from information leakage whilst allowing them to maximise execution potential. Order types offered include market and limit orders, and day/ immediate-or-cancel orders.

Access and participation

BlockCross is available to both the buy- and sell-side, allows direct orders and also utilises blotter-scraping technology. It is open to investment firms whose principal activity is discretionary management of assets on behalf of clients, and liquidity providers that are typically engaged in the provision of execution and trading services including agency and full service brokers, MTFs and exchanges. Access is offered via the BlockCross graphical user interface or manually, via order or execution management systems (OMS/EMS). Both of these access methods can be integrated to offer information on alerting and facilitate the order workflow. Liquidity providers can access BlockCross manually via their OMS/EMS, or automatically using a programmatic interface. BlockCross currently has 46 members, comprising 25 buy-side and 21 sell-side participants.

Instruments traded

BlockCross supports trading in equities and global depository receipts across 18 European markets. Average execution size is £ 250,000 and almost 80% of executions are in small- and mid-caps. Over the past three months, BlockCross averaged £ 1.5 billion of available liquidity on a daily basis.

Order protection

The dark pool offers minimum acceptable quantity functionality to deter any systematic pinging/gaming models, proprietary real-time monitoring and surveillance and automatic behaviour assessment expressed through user/participant quality indicators.

Connectivity/sharing agreements

BlockCross does not have any liquidity sharing arrangements in place.