REUTERS FINANCIAL PRODUCTS

In the lead up to MiFID go live in November 2007, there was a lot of speculation about fragmenting liquidity in European equity markets. At Reuters we launched our Market Share Report to give a high level view of trading across the European Equities and help inform our customers' trading decisions.

The data, at country and index level is freely available from reuters.com/mifid. Data on an individual stock basis available to subscribers to Reuters Transactions Cost Analysis Service (RTCAS).

So far only Chi-x and Plus Markets are offering competition to the domestic exchanges, with new venues Turquoise and Equiduct not launching until later in the year. On one view then little has changed. But what about the fragmentation in publication of trades executed over-the-counter?

OTC surprise

On 25th February we published the statistics for November, December & January. There has been considerable fragmentation. New entrant MarkitBOAT is making substantial inroads into the publication of trades once carried by domestic exchanges.

In the months of MiFID, MarkitBOAT has reported the third highest value of trades reported across all European equities after Euronext and the London Stock Exchange (LSE).

All European Equities - % share by value for all Trades

	January '08	December '07	November '07
Euronext incl OTC	18.34%	19.51%	17.39%
LSE incl OTC	15.97%	17.59%	18.35%
Markit BOAT	15.72%	17.10%	17.52%
Xetra incl OTC	15.60%	13.85%	13.29%

When performing the same analysis based on the number of shares traded MarkitBOAT published the second highest volume to the LSE. The LSE published over twice the volume in shares as MarkitBOAT, who in turn were significantly ahead of Euronext & Xetra.

MarkitBOAT published the second highest value and volume of shares when analysing on a per country of listing basis including the Italian, Spanish, UK & Euronext markets.

The methodology

Reuters has access to data from approximately 15,000 EU listed stocks of which 10,000 were actively traded in these three months with about half having trades published by more than one source. Producing these statistics involved analysis of about 100,000 Reuters Instrument Codes (RICs) in European domiciled stocks across all European exchanges and other reporting venues in which over-the-counter and order book trades could be reported.

For more information about these reports, how to access the underlying data on a per stock level, and Reuters MiFID services, please contact andrew.allwright@reuters.com.