Markit, a financial information services provider, launches Markit MSA, a new market share analysis service designed to bring further transparency to the European equity market.
Markit MSA provides a greater insight into the new trading landscape that has emerged since the introduction of MiFID last November. The proliferation of alternative trading venues and dark pools across the continent has resulted in fragmented trading, making it difficult for market participants to monitor liquidity and market activity.
Since the introduction of MiFID, the European equity market has changed dramatically, says Niall Cameron, executive vice president of equities, indices, commodities and risk Management at Markit. We created Markit MSA to help market participants understand the shifts taking place in equity trading by tracking liquidity and market activity.
Markit MSA is a service that collates information on cash and synthetic equity trades executed on traditional exchanges, MTFs and OTC markets. The data is then consolidated to provide users with an aggregated view of market activity. The service ranks brokers on each European trading venue, stock or index according to the volume and value of their trades.
Buy-side institutions will use Markit MSA to help identify pools of liquidity and inform their choice of broker when seeking to execute trades. Sell-side institutions will use the service to ascertain their market share for marketing and business development purposes. Regulators will be able to use Markit MSA to monitor liquidity patterns and trading trends.
“Markit MSA is an insightful tool that provides us with independent and validated metrics for equity market activity and liquidity,” says David Tait, executive director and co-head of Morgan Stanley Electronic Trading in Europe. Since the service combines both on and off order book data, it will provide the first consolidated European market share reporting service allowing us to promote our market share to clients.”
Markit MSA was launched with the support of 11 financial institutions that have committed to send trade information to the service. Together, these institutions represent 60% of all cash equity trading in Europe. MSA will initially cover 44,000 European cash and synthetic equities. The MSA dataset is available on a T+1 basis.
D.C.