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"The one-size-fits-all solution doesn’t work any more" |
Plus Markets, a London exchange group, has launched a new trading platform and expanded the list of stocks it trades. The new system, provided by OMX, will offer cheap quote-driven trading in 7,500 securities including the stocks of all the companies listed on the London Stock Exchange, 70 AIM-listed companies and several of the most liquid continental stocks. This is in addition to the more than 200 stocks listed on Plus itself. The move has come as a surprise to some market observers, who thought that Plus’s ambitions were confined to small-cap and micro-cap stocks and who believed that Plus was positioning itself as an alternative to AIM.
"Since our fundraising at the end of 2006, our strategy has become a lot more ambitious than many realize," says Nemone Wynn-Evans, director of business development at Plus Markets. "When we started out, the market believed that we were positioning ourselves to compete directly against AIM for smaller-company listings and that was where the ambitions stopped. But we have never seen ourselves as competing against AIM so much as the LSE itself."