The value of the stocks they match is crashing and surging by record amounts but for Europe’s incumbent exchanges and their upstart multilateral trading facility competitors, it is clearly business as usual.
This September, Euronext announced plans to become the first of Europe’s incumbent exchanges to launch a pan-European MTF, taking on established rivals in their home markets and new competitors such as Chi-X and Turquoise. NasdaqOMX confirmed that it was set to launch its own pan-European trading platform on September 26, just six months after announcing its intention to do so. The news followed a recent announcement from the London Stock Exchange about plans for a pan-European dark pool and was preceded by news that Deutsche Börse was also studying the possibility of launching an MTF.
Euronext’s plans for an order book MTF to trade European stocks outside of its home markets in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Portugal comes just months after the exchange group announced plans to launch a dark pool for block orders, called Smart Pool, that is due to launch this month and that it is developing with BNP Paribas and HSBC.
"The reasons are quite simple," explains Cees Vermaas, executive director at Euronext.