Tora, an Asia-focused technology and trading service provider, has extended the reach of its liquidity aggregation service to Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia.
TORA Crosspoint, which has so far only been available in Japan, will allow buy-side clients to hunt for liquidity in a number of off-exchange trading venues, including dark pools, as part of their normal execution process.
Traders that send orders via TORA Compass, the firm’s execution management system, will have the ability to simultaneously work their orders via Tora’s smart order routing technology to external venues as well as natural liquidity that already resides in Crosspoint. The firm is in “detailed discussions” with four or five brokers about connecting to their internal dark pools and hopes to have a total of eight liquidity providers on board before the end of 2010.
In Japan, Crosspoint is already connected to Credit Suisse’s Crossfinder dark pool and proprietary trading systems Japannext and Kabu.com. Crosspoint handles about 4% of total liquidity on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and reported that it traded $1.5 billion of daily liquidity during the first quarter 2010.
According to Chris Jenkins, managing director, Tora, the liquidity that already resides in Crosspoint will be an attractive proposition for buy-side traders and will help to differentiate the pools from the slew of other liquidity aggregation products that are starting to appear in Asia.
“In TORA Crosspoint, we already have inherent liquidity and natural crosses. Our goal is to give our clients even more options and make it easier to access other liquidity pools as part of their existing workflow processes,” Jenkins told theTRADEnews.com. “Clients are increasingly demanding liquidity aggregation services in Asia. We think there will only be two or three successful offerings in the region and we plan to be one of them.”
Technology provider and agency broker ITG launched its own dark liquidity aggregation service, POSIT Marketplace, in Hong Kong in March, which enables buy-side institutions to cross against liquidity from multiple Asian broker dark pools at the same time as order flow from POSIT, ITG’s established buy-side-focused crossing network. Chi-East, a joint venture between the Singapore Exchange and market centre operator Chi-X Global, will offer dark trading in blue-chip stocks to sell-side market participants in Singapore, Australia, Hong Kong and Japan upon its expected launch at the ends of this quarter. Meanwhile, agency broker Instinet links Asian liquidity pools via its Nighthawk algorithm.
The expansion of Crosspoint closely follows a minority investment in Tora by Goldman Sachs.