As the EU’s Mifid rulebook approaches its twentieth anniversary, it’s remarkable to reflect on how much the European trading landscape has evolved. For Cboe Europe, the milestone carries particular meaning. Established directly in response to the Mifid rulebook in 2007, we’ve grown into the largest pan-European stock exchange, accounting for around 26% of on-exchange trading on a daily basis – simplifying cross-border equities trading, boosting competition, improving execution outcomes and lowering costs for investors along the way.
Alex Dalley
From launching the first pan-European lit order book and delivering cost-efficient trade reporting services, to introducing periodic auctions and setting new transparency standards through our widely-used Market Share webpage, client-led innovation has always been central to our mission.
And our momentum continues to build: Here are four areas of focus guiding our business in 2026 as we continue our mission to deliver better execution outcomes for end investors.
Delivering robust, diverse pan-european lit order books
Even though lit order book volumes have declined, the trend is often overstated when viewed in the context of overall addressable trading (see Chart 1). Lit order books remain the largest category of on-exchange trading in European equities, underscoring their importance in terms of price discovery and execution certainty. They sit at the core of Cboe Europe’s offering – providing quick, reliable and cost-effective access to liquidity in equities and ETFs across 18 European countries.
We continue to work hard to ensure they remain attractive venues to trade. Our commitment to enhancing our EBBO presence, maximising certainty and time‑to‑fill for client limit orders, thoughtfully integrating all of our services through sweep functionality and maintaining a competitive, egalitarian fee structure is supporting the ongoing growth and quality of our lit orderbooks.
A key initiative to further enhance our lit order books is our EBBO retail trading service, which supports our vision of a strong, on-exchange retail trading ecosystem and fosters more diverse lit order books that benefit all investors. The service enables brokers to execute retail orders free of charge across more than 9,000 European equities and ETFs, with execution at or better than the EBBO. Fully integrated into our lit order books and supported by retail liquidity providers quoting exclusively for retail flow, the service has already seen strong early engagement. We are focused on expanding participation and delivering technical enhancements to further improve outcomes for retail investors.
Providing a choice of trading mechanisms
While lit order books remain essential to many trading strategies, we also understand that intermediaries or end investors have no single “best” way to trade.
That’s why, across our exchanges in the Netherlands and the UK, clients can choose the execution method that best meets their execution objectives – whether that’s speed and certainty, block‑liquidity discovery, price improvement, information protection, or explicit cost optimisation. Our offering spans lit and dark order books, periodic auctions, Cboe BIDS Europe, Cboe BIDS VWAP‑X and Cboe Closing Cross.
Periodic auctions, a trading category that Cboe pioneered, continue to be rapidly adopted as venues that de-emphasise the benefits of speed, offer price improvement and minimise market impact. Having reached record levels already this year, we’re keen to support further growth though better enabling trading across the spread range. We’re also preparing to bring our latest innovation, Cboe BIDS VWAP-X – a venue-based trajectory crossing service – to the EU, subject to regulatory approval.
Setting the standard in trade reporting
Cboe Europe’s trade reporting services enable firms to meet a wide range of business and regulatory requirements. Our approved publication arrangement (APA) provides a comprehensive and cost‑effective solution for fulfilling OTC reporting obligations and now accounts for the reporting of around 90% of all OTC equities trades.
Through our Exchange-Trade Reporting (ETR) service, firms can report bilateral trades into an on-exchange, centrally cleared environment – supporting regulatory goals to move more trading on‑exchange and reducing counterparty risk by converting bilateral trades into CCP‑cleared transactions.
In our role as the largest equities APA, a key area of focus is working with the industry to further improve OTC market data quality. We’ll also be introducing a new service to help systematic internalisers prepare for the delayed‑quote publication requirements coming into force in August 2026.
Continuing to advocate for better markets
We’ve long been a strong voice in shaping European market structure, championing initiatives and reforms that put issuers and end investors first – from competitive clearing to real-time pre- and post-trade consolidated tapes for equities. We remain relentlessly focused on improving European markets and promoting transparency to lower barriers to investing and grow European markets. In particular, the industry needs to reframe how it thinks about liquidity as alternative trading mechanisms have grown. Focusing only on CLOBs understates the true European liquidity picture; instead benchmarks should reflect liquidity across CLOBs, midpoint books, periodic auctions, electronic block trading platforms, and certain off‑book executions.
As the EU moves toward finalising its capital‑markets integration package, we will continue to call for mandated CCP interoperability across all major cash‑equities exchanges and for regulation that protects the ability of exchanges to innovate and compete effectively.
