Pan-European equity trading platform Turquoise’s market share has started to show signs of recovery in UK blue chips following the expiration of its market-making agreements.
According to figures from rival trading platform BATS Europe, Turquoise’s share of the value traded in the FTSE 100 index on 7 May was 7.24%, compared with 7.60% on 13 March, the last day the market-making agreements with its nine founding banks were in place.
On 16 March, the first trading day after the agreements expired, Turquoise’s share of FTSE traded value fell to 5.66% and by the end of that week had slumped to 2.12%, according to the BATS figures. Turquoise’s share of pan-European traded value dropped from 5.77% on 13 March to 3.60% on 16 March, and by the end of that week had fallen to 1.52%.
“We have had a continued increase of new participants over the last few months and members are seeing the benefits of trading on Turquoise,” Duncan Higgins, head of client relationship management, Turquoise, told theTRADEnews.com. “Our members are obtaining high fill rates and price improvement and, as a result, actively increasing the flow they direct to Turquoise.”
Turquoise’s nine founding banks were committed to making markets on the MTF for the first six months from launch.
Turquoise continued to lose European market share in April, according to Citi’s monthly European liquidity report. The report noted that Turquoise received 2.1% fewer orders in Germany in April than it had in March, 3% fewer in France, 3.8% fewer in the Netherlands and 0.8% fewer in the UK. Citi found that BATS Europe and Chi-X were the main beneficiaries of Turquoise’s losses.
Meanwhile on the UK front, Turquoise has also seen a marked increase in trading of FTSE 250 stocks, from just over 0.5% at the beginning of April to a high of 3.12% on Thursday, 7 May. Higgins notes that this was due to the migration of these stocks from Turquoise’s non-displayed book to its integrated lit/dark order book on 23 March.
However, Turquoise is regaining little ground across Europe. According to the Fidessa Fragmentation Index, an analysis of order book trades across primary exchanges and MTFs, Turquoise’s share of DAX stocks was at 2.55% last week compared to 2.33% at the week after the market-making deals expired and its share of Italian MIB stocks was 0.77% last week compared to 0.83% at the end of March. According the BATS figures, Turquoise’s overall pan-European value market share was 2.97% on May 7, slightly lower than its share directly after the market-making deals expired.