Reuters offers clients consolidated prices in time for MiFID

Market data provider Reuters is offering clients the ability to see the best bid and offer price on major stocks wherever they are quoted from, the firm announced Monday.
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Market data provider Reuters is offering clients the ability to see the best bid and offer price on major stocks wherever they are quoted from, the firm announced Monday. The consolidated price aims to enable clients to comply with MiFID's best execution requirements, which come into force on 1 November, via a special type of Reuters Instrument Code (RIC) known as ".x".

These RICs will bring together data on all trades around a stock as they happen so that best bid and offer data from all relevant exchanges will be available, explains the firm. "Banks need a cost-effective means of consolidating data in one place to comply with MiFID," comments a representative.

Currently, trade and price data on individual stocks is concentrated on individual exchanges but, under MiFID, investment firms will be required to publish data on all trading activity that does not take place on an exchange or multi-lateral trading facility (MTF) immediately after a trade is done, potentially causing fragmentation of price and trade data across multiple venues.

In the US, this problem has been solved by a national best bid and offer price mandated by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). MiFID explicitly leaves market forces to provide the same solution in Europe, a stance to which Reuters is responding with the ".x" RIC.

Stephen Wilson, global head of exchange-traded instruments, Reuters comments, "Our customers know that MiFID is the biggest regulatory change to hit European markets in the last twenty years. It is crucial for them to know what the best bid and offer on any major stock is, wherever it is quoted, and the new Reuters .x RIC will allow them to do this."

Reuters says it is committed to offering the tools its customers need to comply with MiFID, launching Reuters Trade Publication earlier this year to provide a cost effective means for firms to publish trades they execute away from exchanges.

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