NYSE Euronext’s European Dark Pool Starts Trading Swiss Stocks
NYSE Euronext (NYX)’s SmartPool European dark pool began offering trading in Swiss stocks as it challenges the Swiss exchange for business.
SmartPool will offer trading of the 20 biggest Swiss stocks and the 30 largest midcaps from today, Lee Hodgkinson, chief executive officer of London-based SmartPool and head of European sales and relationship management at NYSE Euronext (NYX), said in an interview. Transactions will be cleared by EuroCCP, the European division of U.S. clearinghouse Depository Trust & Clearing Corp.
The Swiss exchange entered a partnership with the electronic brokerage Nyfix Inc. to offer trading of large blocks of Swiss stocks in 2007, a project put together by Hodgkinson who at the time worked for the exchange and ran the SWX Europe Ltd. platform from Zurich. In 2009 NYSE hired Hodgkinson to run SmartPool and, separately, agreed to buy Nyfix.
“We inherited the service and it came to conclusion at the end of June and so now we’re trading Swiss stocks” on our own system, Hodgkinson said. “We have expanded the range of securities to the Swiss midcaps and will be seeking to add new customers from Switzerland.”
SmartPool, a dark pool the world’s largest stock exchange owns with BNP Paribas (BNP) SA, HSBC Holdings Plc and JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), began trading European stocks in February 2009. The system offers shares listed on the U.K.’s FTSE All-Share Index (ASX), Germany’s DAX Index, the Netherlands’ AEX All-Share Index and France’s CAC All-Share Index. Dark pools match orders anonymously and don’t publish prices.
SIX Group, operator of the Swiss stock exchange, and Liquidnet Holdings Inc., a trading platform used by institutions such as mutual funds to buy and sell large blocks of shares, have said they will link to allow members of both to trade European and Swiss markets. Members of the Zurich-based Swiss exchange will get access to Liquidnet’s pool to trade 3,600 securities in Switzerland, the U.K., France, Germany and the Netherlands.
To contact the reporter on this story: Nandini Sukumar in London at nsukumar@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Andrew Rummer at arummer@bloomberg.net
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