Liquidnet, a trading network also referred to as a ‘dark pool’ due to the anonymity offered to its members, has launched its Next Gen Algo suite in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (Emea), following the product’s debut in the US last year.
The suite is designed to enhance the trading performance of institutional clients by giving them access to large-scale liquidity, including both dark and ‘lit’ markets. A “lit” market is where the prices are viewable by the public; dark trading is not visible to the lit participants.
Next Gen Algo has the liquidity-seeking algo, Barracuda, within it, which has been designed to simultaneously seek a block of securities in Liquidnet’s system while also searching for available liquidity across lit and dark markets.
Chris Jackson, European head of Liquidnet’s execution and quantitative services group, said that rules under the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II that will limit trading in ‘dark’ liquidity, mean that “algos that both intelligently access the lit market and large-in-scale blocks in the dark, will become more and more important to our members”.
©2016 funds europe
