iShares, the exchange-traded fund (ETF) provider owned by Blackrock, and Bloomberg have teamed up to offer a consolidated tape for ETFs designed to improve transparency and limit the impact of market fragmentation.
The aggregated data offering will initially include European iShares ETFs and allow investors to see the best bid and offer prices and where liquidity exists.
Bloomberg will use its European composite tickets to aggregate volumes and trading data for reported OTC and exchange trades in iShares ETFs. The data includes information from 22 venues in Europe where ETFs are traded.
The iShares FTSE 100 is currently traded in sterling on five European exchanges and in euros on four European exchanges. To determine the overall volumes traded, an investor previously needed to look up five different tickers to arrive at a sterling total and four different tickers for a euro total. Using the new Bloomberg and BlackRock solution, this total volume can be viewed on one consolidated ticker for sterling and one consolidated ticker for euro. Over the entire iShares product range, this means that investors can now use just 517 tickers to view volumes that were previously spread over 1,385 tickers.
Currently, not all ETF trades are reported but this could change under MiFID II if proposals to treat reporting of ETF trades like equity trades are upheld. MiFID II, which will come into force by 2014, presently favours a commercial approach to the creation of a consolidated tape, with providers basing products on pre-defined standards set by the legislation.
“Industry players have long called for the creation of a consolidated tape,” said Jean-Paul Zammitt, Bloomberg’s global head of core product. “We’re pleased to work with iShares to create the first composite view of the European ETF marketplace.”