Markit, a market data provider, has launched Markit MSA, a service that ranks brokers by their European equity trading activity, both on and off order book.
MSA collates information on cash and synthetic equity trades (contracts for difference or swaps that have 100% exposure to an underlying equity) executed by brokers on traditional exchanges, multilateral trading facilities and in the over-the-counter markets. By consolidating the data, the service allows users to identify the most active brokers within an instrument, an index, a sector or a specific trading venue.
The MSA data is available on a T+1 basis, and will initially cover 44,000 European cash and synthetic equities. Data is currently sourced from 11 brokers, representing 60% of all cash equity trading in Europe, including Citi, Dresdner Kleinwort, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS. “We are looking for more participants, and we expect some new firms to come on board in early 2009,” Donna Bales, director at Markit and product manager for MSA, told theTRADEnews.com.
Markit hopes that buy-side firms will use MSA to identify pools of liquidity and inform their choice of broker. The firm added that the sell-side could use their market share numbers on MSA for marketing and business development, while regulators might use the data to monitor liquidity patterns and market trends. The service is now live for all users.
Although MSA includes data for OTC trades, these are not divided by venue, so it is not yet possible to use the system to determine the amount of flow in individual brokers’ dark pools. However, Bales said, “It is something that we are discussing with the design group to do next year.”
The firm also expects to add more European equity instrument types to the service in the first half of 2009.