Turquoise’s automated conditional order service Turquoise Block Discovery has marked its first year of operation by announcing that it has matched trades of more than €1 billion.
In a media statement, it said more than 20 brokers now use the service and that the average trade size now stands at €200,000.
The company said that this equated to around 20 times the industry dark pool average, in the statement.
Robert Barnes, chief executive officer of Turquoise, said the business has achieved more trades in more than 900 stock names across 15 primary markets in its first year.
He added: “It is active and working well ahead of MiFID II with half of all Block Indications already above 100% large-in-scale.”
In response to a request from The Trade News, block trading specialist Liquidnet said that its average execution size for the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region was £1.5 million for the third quarter of 2015.
It added that the total principal traded for the third quarter in the region as $34.7 billion.
Mark Pumfrey, head of EMEA at Liquidnet, said: “We have seen strong growth from institutions searching for size and execution quality ahead of MiFID II and have been achieving record levels of trading as a result.”
Turquoise Block Discovery said its most note-worthy trades included €5.39 million in SAB Miller as well as €5.71 million in technology group Hexagon AB.
Turquoise claims Block Discovery is also the first product of its kind to reverse the trend of shrinking trade sizes on electronic orderbooks since they were introduced a decade ago.
By Paul Walsh, staff writer