Investment Technology Group (NYSE: ITG), a leading agency broker and financial technology firm, has extended the reach of Posit to cover equities from the Czech Republic, Hungary and South Africa, as well as the International Order Book (IOB) - the London Stock Exchange's market for liquid emerging markets' stocks.
This brings the number of stocks covered by POSIT to over 14,000.
The expansion of POSIT comes one year after the launch of POSIT Alert which notifies users to trading opportunities. POSIT is an independent dark pool with diverse, high quality liquidity and is Europe's longest running crossing system. It provides participants with opportunities to match equity orders at the mid-point price of the spread of the stock with complete confidentiality, anonymity and minimal market impact. The suite includes POSIT Alert, POSIT Now (continuous crossing) and POSIT Match (scheduled crossing). Since the introduction of MiFID in November 2007, POSIT is categorised as a multilateral trading facility.
In addition to the inclusion of stocks from the Czech Republic, Hungary and South Africa, access to the IOB boosts POSIT's coverage by a further 37 countries, including Poland, Russia and Turkey.
Commenting, David Stevens, CEO of ITG in Europe, said: "We have always been sensitive to our clients' needs. This expansion is in direct response to increased interest in emerging markets and requests to expand POSIT's geographic scope so that traders can access our substantial pool of liquidity. During 2009, we will be adding additional markets and more functionality to meet the needs of our clients."
POSIT can be accessed from the ITG Dark Algorithm and a number of ITG front ends, such as the Triton execution management system and ITG ChannelTM, as well as FIX and directly from users' own order management systems.