Instinet sets Canadian stock trading launch for Q4
Lynne Olver, Reuters
Published: Monday, June 11, 2007
By Lynne Olver
TORONTO (Reuters) - Electronic brokerage Instinet Inc. will enter an increasingly crowded field with its planned launch of a Canadian equities trading system in the fourth quarter.
Instinet, owned by Japan's Nomura Holdings Inc. <8604.T>, said the trading system, called ICX, will be available to trade Toronto Stock Exchange-listed securities between 8:30 a.m. and 5 p.m. Eastern Time.
The Toronto exchange, run by TSX Group , is facing competition from a variety of electronic networks and alternative trading systems, or ATSs, including one backed by seven of its largest customers.
Last week, TSX Group President Richard Nesbitt predicted that some of the new and proposed ATSs would find a niche and survive, but some would not.
Instinet Senior Vice-President Tal Cohen said his company's ICX market model will be fully anonymous and will adhere to strict price-time priority for orders.
"We think those two things together will level the playing field and improve price discovery in Canada," Cohen said in an interview.
Instinet's market data will be available for free, and the system's technology will evolve as its users increase, he said.
Rather than draw investors away from the Toronto Stock Exchange, Cohen said Instinet expects the entire pie to grow larger as another trading platform draws more global investors to Canadian equities, including more algorithmic traders.
"We don't really envision this as a zero-sum game, what we're looking to do is add liquidity, add interest in Canada."
Instinet does want to take a "disproportionate" share of any increase in trading volume that comes about, he added.
But other groups are poised to jump into the business as well.
Seven large investment dealers, six of them owned by Canada's big banks, have said they will develop their own ATS, called project Alpha, although it is not expected to be running until next year.
Pure Trading, an ATS developed by privately held Canadian Trading & Quotation System Inc., plans to launch this summer. Pure Trading is aiming for a mid-July start, but an exact date has not been set.
In addition, a number of "dark" pools of liquidity have emerged in Canada, allowing institutional investors to bypass exchanges and anonymously execute large trades electronically, with minimal information leaking out to affect market prices. These include Perimeter Financial's BlockBook, Liquidnet Canada, and others.
TSX Group plans to launch its own "dark liquidity" matching system, called ATX, this summer.
© Reuters 2007
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