Liquidity Landscape: Shifting waters

In the APAC region, there is a growing shift from high-touch block desks to electronic platforms for anonymous matching. This trend is accompanied by an increasing appetite for new dark venues in venues where historically they have not existed outside the likes of Liquidnet, evidenced by New Zealand's NZX launching an exchange dark pool and discussions of a broker consortium in South Korea operating the country's first ATS. There is also a growing use of the conditional order type to rest full-size orders at multiple venues simultaneously. Liquidnet currently offers conditional venues across eleven APAC markets. The use of Proprietary Trading Systems (PTS) for price improvement is also rising. Additionally, the JPX has already begun publishing dark pool usage data for the Japanese market, having started in September 2023, with data available from September 2020.

Roland de Marsangy, Head of Sales, Liquidnet APAC and Stuart Thompson, Head of EQS, Liquidnet APAC