Turquoise share trading platform goes live
August 15th, 2008 | by admin |By Daisy Ku
LONDON, Aug 15 (Reuters) - Investment-bank owned sharetrading platform Turquoise went live on Friday, marking theupstart’s long-delayed opening shot in its battle with incumbentstock exchanges across Europe.
The cash equity trading platform, which aims to offercheaper trading for banks and brokerages than existing bourses,was initially offering a platform for trading in five stockseach in Britain and Germany.
“We did our first trades at 8 a.m. … and we’ve had ordersand executions all morning,” Turquoise Chief Executive EliLederman told Reuters.
“Members will take a while to get comfortable with it all,and certainly we expect volumes to be small, more likeproduction testing, until we complete the first clearing andsettlement cycles,” he said.
The trading platform, a so-called Multilateral TradingFacility (MTF), will extend its services to 1,300 stocks across13 European markets in the next few weeks.
Turquoise had initially planned to go live soon after MiFID– new European Union regulation for financial markets — wasintroduced, but experienced long delays in choosing the righttrading engines and management to run the venture.
Diana Chan, chief executive of European Central CounterpartyLtd (EuroCCP) — the clearing partner of Turquoise — said thefirst clearing and settlement of trades on the Turquoise systemwill complete next Tuesday in Germany and Wednesday in Britain.
By 1002 GMT, Turquoise saw 64,143 Vodafone shares VODl.TQtraded on its platform, a fraction of the 33.6 million (VOD.L: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz)traded on the London Stock Exchange (LSE.L: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and the 7.5 milliontraded on rival exchange Chi-X Europe VODl.CHI.
