SmartPool Enlightens Dark Traders
Wednesday, March 17, 2010

SmartPool, the European dark liquidity pool created by NYSE Euronext in partnership with HSBC, J.P.Morgan and BNP Paribas, has announced  that it is launching a new service  designed to help traders and other market users access, interpret and navigate the post trade data published by European 'dark trading' venues.

Dark pools of liquidity enable institutional traders to buy and sell large batches of stock without revealing pre-trade data to the public. Taking place off-exchange and classed as over-the-counter transactions, it is thought that dark trading accounts for at least 10% of market share. However, dark trading has come in for criticism from national regulators and governments because it makes the market place less transparent. Christine Lagarde, the French finance minister is one prominent politician who has called for tougher regulations to be applied to dark trading.

Delivered in partnership with NYSE Technologies, SmartPool’s MatchView service will be powered by and fully integrated within the NYSE Technologies liquidity discovery service, ioinet, a fast growing provider of indications of interest and Trade Adverts to over 350 buy-side and 150 sell-side institutions.

SmartPool MatchView will go live in the second quarter of 2010 with data initially provided by SmartPool. Post-trade content from other European multilateral trading facility dark venues will be added over the summer, subject to commercial contract.  Other sources of dark OTC data will also be added.

Specifically designed to enhance liquidity discovery and to support the trading decision, the SmartPool MatchView value proposition is built around three core differentiators:

• Real-time access to all post trade executions published by dark pool venues.
• Liquidity discovery through the provision of  analysis tools for all post trade executions published by dark pool venues.
• Increased transparency to gain an insight into the “personality” of each pool.

Lee Hodgkinson, SmartPool CEO commented:

“Increased competition is delivering enormous benefits to the European equity market, including lower cost and greater innovation, but these benefits have come at the expense of coherent post trade information. The opacity of post trade data is particularly problematic in the dark space, where the desire from traders as well as other market users and regulatory agencies, for increased post trade transparency is overwhelming - most recently highlighted by the report produced by Pierre Fleuriot for the French government. SmartPool MatchView offers an innovative real-time solution to meet this industry need.”

Paul Scott, Global Head Liquidity Discovery, NYSE of Technologies, said:

“The partnership between SmartPool and NYSE Technologies to create MatchView has combined our market-leading ioinet technology with the SmartPool dark data to provide clients with a unique way to monitor dark trading activity. By leveraging the powerful data analysis facilities of ioinet to filter, aggregate and visualize SmartPool dark data, clients are able to track dark trading activity like never before."