Instinet Debuts Australian Liquidity Pool

Instinet, the provider of e-trading and agency-only brokerage services, announced that its Instinet Australia Pty Limited subsidiary has launched Instinet BLX Australia, a new liquidity pool for Australian equities.

BLX -- which Instinet also operates in the US and Canada -- aggregates multiple orders from both buy- and sell-side participants and consolidates them into block-sized trades. The unique BLX model was designed to increase trade size by appealing to an array of trading participants, including both passive block traders and those using algorithmic trading strategies.

"With the Australian equities market becoming more electronic and institutional trading needs becoming more complex, we believe this is an ideal time to introduce a pool like BLX that combines the benefits of both block and continuous trading," says Matthew Moore, head of Australian Sales at Instinet.

Moore also notes with the mid-point matching model employed by BLX, price improvement is likely. "In BLX you know you're always trading at the middle of the spread rather than paying a premium just to get a block trade done. This results in greater price improvement, the benefits of which flow right through the investment chain," he says.

BLX Australia joins Instinet's Australian sales trading desk and its suite of electronic trading tools for the Australian market, including its global broker-neutral Execution Management System (EMS), Newport3, and the Asia-Pacific-tailored Execution Experts algorithmic suite. It also becomes the firm's fifth alternative liquidity pool in the Asia-Pacific region along with JapanCrossing, KoreaCross, CBX Japan and CBX Hong Kong. Phil Albinus is the former editor-in-chief of Advanced Trading. He has nearly two decades of journalism experience and has been covering financial technology and regulation for nine years. Before joining Advanced Trading, he served as editor of Waters, a monthly trade journal ... View Full Bio