On 29 October Instinet set a one-day firm record of 113.5 million shares traded in Instinet CBX, its U.S. dark liquidity pool, topping its previous best of 69 million shares set in August of this year.
“As an agency broker, our sole focus is on helping our clients to achieve a high-quality trade execution, for which liquidity sourcing is an integral component”, says Michael Plunkett, president of North America, Instinet. “Instinet CBX, with its speed, anonymity and breadth of liquidity, is one of the Street’s largest dark liquidity pools, and we appreciate our clients’ confidence in us as we’ve gradually grown it over the past two years.”
Instinet CBX, whose technology powers Instinet’s matching platforms around the world, is an institutional dark pool that passively exposes orders to Instinet’s U.S. order flow of over 3 billion shares daily. The system’s low latency allows orders to be checked for a match without missing other execution opportunities, while Instinet’s agency model ensures against data-mining, reverse engineering or information leakage.
It also offers significant price-improvement potential; in a recent study, 79% of shares in trades where the spread was larger than one penny achieved price improvement.