Matt Levine, Columnist

Barclays Not Smart

You want it to be one way, institutions trading with each other without the intervention of short-term profit-oriented electronic traders. But it's the other way.

June 26, 2014 at 6:06 PM UTC

By Matt Levine

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Here is a lesson in the grammar of financial presentations. Barclays runs a dark pool called Barclays LX. In that dark pool, institutions can trade stocks without publicly displaying their orders, as they would on a stock exchange. Barclays pitched this dark pool to investors by telling them that it monitored the dark pool to keep out "predatory" traders and let in only nice, well-behaved traders. It showed them this chart: