Quote from marketsurfer:
<i>Where, then, does the appeal of off-board trading lie for institutional customers? The answer resides in their need to control market impact costs by properly timing, pricing and sizing their orders while maintaining anonymity and virtual invisibility. To this end, they wish to see the trades and quotes of others without showing their own hand. Accordingly, with an electronic platform, they slice and dice their orders and trade algorithmically.
But give institutions the alternative of transacting in size at prices they have confidence in, and they will take it. Institutions have found that they can get good size done with minimal spread or impact cost (if any) in a crossing network (such as POSIT) or in an ATS (such as Liquidnet or Pipeline) that offers dark liquidity and minimal information leakage (if any). The Big Board is moving in the right direction by itself providing a dark pool: In the first half of '07, trading is expected to start on MatchPoint, the exchange's own crossing network.</i>
by professor Robert A. Schwartz