Instinet Incorporated, a global leader in electronic trading and agency-only brokerage services, today announced that its U.S. brokerage subsidiary, Instinet, LLC, has launched Instinet Options CBX™. The platform, which is currently live, has an established base of liquidity providers and complements the agency-only broker’s existing options product offering.
“We are poised to apply our experience and insights in cash equity markets to US listed options markets as they continue evolving,” said Jonathan Kellner, President of the Americas at Instinet. “While there are key market microstructure differences between equities and options, the main contributor to providing best execution to our clients in any asset class lies in the seamless and stable interaction between the EMS, algorithms, smart routing, and crossing networks.”
He continued: “We leveraged our flexible, multi-asset technology platform to bring a completely dark liquidity pool to listed options at an early stage of the market's electronic evolution. Because of our continued success in integrating options trading functionality into other components of our product suite, we felt the time was right to extend our crossing infrastructure to offer an options liquidity pool.”
Instinet Options CBX supports mid-point crosses and allows for sub-increment prints on exchanges where permitted. The platform has launched with an established base of liquidity, and, unlike other options dark pools, is targeted to clients trading all order sizes rather than those just looking to trade large blocks.
John Duffell, Chief Strategy Officer at Instinet, noted: “Our clients tell us that they would find value in an agency-operated options liquidity pool that provides price improvement opportunities for orders of all sizes. We’ve been pleased with the reaction we’ve received thus far to the Options CBX and are excited to extend our options offering.”
Since acquiring TORC Financial in 2009, Instinet has significantly enhanced its options trading capabilities. The former TORC technology is now being leveraged throughout the firm’s entire product suite, including within the Newport® 3 EMS, Execution Experts™ algorithms and smart order routing, FIX routing, risk control and multi-asset analytics technologies.
Instinet Options CBX will complement the firm’s existing suite of U.S. liquidity pools, including Instinet’s CBX for equities, which in June 2010 was the U.S. market’s largest agency-operated dark pool (77.8 million shares/day ADV), according to Rosenblatt Securities.
Instinet Options CBX is currently available through direct FIX connectivity, as a destination in the firm’s front-end trading systems and through its liquidity seeking algorithms and smart order router. Additionally, it will soon be available via a range of third party providers.