The service is designed to bring together large block orders in a truly neutral, passive environment.
 
Developed in close partnership with buy and sell-side market participants, it will be supported from launch by seven major brokers including: Barclays, Instinet, ITG, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Neonet and Societe Generale. Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citi, Deutsche Bank, UBS and others are expected to join shortly.
 
Robert Barnes, CEO Turquoise said:
 
“Turquoise Block Discovery™ is an innovation, enhancing the increasingly popular Turquoise Uncross™ which has seen volumes grow more than 200 per cent over the last year. We’ve worked closely with the whole community, responding concretely to buyside demand for improved block trading functionality, well ahead of MiFID II implementation.”
 
Industry-wide support:
As well as brokers, the buy side community has also given its support to Turquoise Block Discovery™. This includes a spectrum of long only buys side asset managers with the stated interest in improving the efficiency of European market structure and the ability to trade larger block size. Firms include Allianz Global Investors Europe, AXA Investment Managers, Baring Asset Management, Cedar Rock Capital, Deka Investment Frankfurt, Newton Investment Management, T Rowe Price, Troy Asset Management and Union Investment Frankfurt.
 
Adam Toms, CEO, Instinet Europe
“The demands of our clients for us to seek out liquidity, combined with an evolving European regulatory landscape which is moving towards the use of larger block trades, make continued development in this area essential. Instinet is an award winning aggregator of liquidity and sees this new Turquoise Block Discovery™ service as an innovative and timely addition to the market.  It provides us with the ability to place a conditional order to a venue offering increased chances of finding a larger block of dark liquidity, while simultaneously being able to continue to search other liquidity pools.”
  
Brian Pomraning, Head of European Equities Execution Services at J.P. Morgan
“J.P. Morgan’s connectivity to this new service will give our institutional clients further access to block liquidity and complements our strategy of offering conditional order-types in JPM-X. This partnership reflects our commitment to achieving the highest possible quality of execution for our clients.”
 
Mark Goodman, Head of Quantitative Electronic Services (QES), Europe, Societe Generale
“We are delighted to offer our clients access to Turquoise Block Discovery™, particularly as one of the early adopters able to leverage the full Block Indicator functionality. A key concern of our clients has been to source block liquidity, and we believe that as an exchange-owned, neutral platform, Turquoise has a significant chance of delivering this.”
 
Nej D’jelal, Head of Equities Electronic Trading Product, EMEA, Barclays
 “We are pleased to offer Turquoise Block Discovery™ as part of our commitment to provide more liquidity seeking options to our clients.”
 
How Turquoise Block Discovery™ works:
 
The new service significantly improves users’ ability, within the Turquoise Midpoint Dark Book, to trade larger block orders by matching Block Indications. On identifying potential matches, the service requires participants to send firm qualifying block orders to Turquoise Uncross™, maximising available liquidity for customers of both services. Robust reputational scoring and surveillance will monitor the conversion of Block Indications into firm orders to optimise the use of the service.
 
Turquoise Uncross™ is a series of randomised uncross events, which take place between 5-45 seconds (the frequency depending on the liquidity of the security). Those executing trades in Turquoise Uncross™ are able to minimise interaction with aggressive, low-latency trading strategies as only resting, passive orders are made available to match. The service’s ability to match larger block orders successfully has been confirmed as best in class by independent venue performance analytics firm, LiquidMetrix.