Investment Technology Group (ITG) and Merrill Lynch & Co. plan to form a joint venture to offer an independent, anonymous block-crossing service to the global trading community, to begin this quarter.
The venture will be called Block Alert and will be powered by ITG’s Posit network, which matches institutional buy and sell orders several times during the trading day.
The pooling of the firms’ crossing interests will combine Merrill’s global presence with a specialty of ITG, a New York-based agency brokerage that has a strong technology emphasis. As a single-stock trading system, Block Alert will replace ITG’s Posit Alert and will be competitive with a number of other such offerings; it is positioned differently from Posit, which is an anonymous list-trading system.
“We think the combination of the two firms is going to bring a huge pool of liquidity to bear, to the benefit of our mutual client bases,” said Raymond Killian, chairman, president and CEO of ITG. “The market environment we’re in right now, and with the regulatory changes anticipated, does nothing but encourage anonymous block trading. It just made a lot of sense domestically and internationally.”