Turquoise to report its own dark trades

Turquoise, a pan-European multilateral trading facility scheduled for launch in August, will report trades executed in its non-displayed order book on its own dedicated facility, rather than using an external trade-reporting mechanism such as Markit BOAT.
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Turquoise, a pan-European multilateral trading facility scheduled for launch in August, will report trades executed in its non-displayed order book on its own dedicated facility, rather than using an external trade-reporting mechanism such as Markit BOAT.

“Everything that gets done on Turquoise is reported by Turquoise on the Turquoise tape, so to speak, which will be distributed directly to members and through market data vendors generally,” a Turquoise spokesman told theTRADEnews.com. “We have no separate requirement for a trade-reporting facility.”

Turquoise's decision to report dark trades on its own system rather than an external one comes despite the fact that seven of Turquoise’s shareholding investment banks also participated in the nine-strong consortium that created BOAT. The BOAT consortium subsequently sold its stake to market data firm Markit.

“It is just as easy to create our own pipe to Bloomberg, Reuters and other data vendors as we’ll be collecting the data ourselves. We don’t need to sell it to Markit to sell it on to Bloomberg and Reuters,” the spokesman said.

Although BOAT is trying to establish itself as the leading trade reporting venue for OTC equities trades in Europe, there has been anecdotal evidence that many buy-side firms have not yet subscribed to its market data services.

Will Meldrum, head of Markit BOAT, accepts that trading venues have a choice of how to publish their trade data, but does not believe the lack of Turquoise data will detract from BOAT’s offering. “We currently have 25 trade reporting clients, including a number of MTFs,” he said. “In just nine months, Markit BOAT has become one of the leading trade reporting venues in Europe and in May 2008, came top of Reuters’ European Equity Market Share Report. This puts us in a good stead for the future and we are currently in discussions with a number of prospective clients.”

Turquoise’s market data will be available free of charge for the first year of operation. Towards the end of the first year, Turquoise plans to assess market data charges in the industry and offer a fee that is competitive compared to the rest of the market. If the market is offering free data in a year’s time, Turquoise will continue to waive market data charges.

Turquoise is scheduled to launch a limited service from 15 August, going fully live with 300 blue-chip European stocks in its displayed order book and 1,200 stocks in its non-displayed book in early September.

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