Quote from Surdo:
Maybe these slimeballs shop your order for 5 seconds for an in house match before it gets excecuted. Knight was famous for this a few years ago.
Major Bank Consortium to Launch New Crossing Platform
by Peter Chapman
Make room for another alternative trading system.
A group of five major Wall Street firms is launching a crossing system called Level ATS intended to help broker-dealers trade large blocks. The new ââ¬Ådark poolââ¬Â joins a growing roster of matching platforms earmarked for the sellside.
Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Fidelity Investments have formed a limited partnership called EBX that will own and operate Level ATS.
The platform, featuring two distinct levels of trading opportunities, was built by Lava Trading and will be supported technologically and operationally under a contract with the Boston Stock Exchange. Lava will also funnel order flow from its vast trading network into Level.
The make-up of the initial Level group is similar to the one backing the new Boston Equities Exchange, an affiliate of the BSE: the Boston, Credit Suisse, Lehman, Fidelity and Citigroup
Whit Conary, a former Boston Stock Exchange specialist, will run the Boston-based Level. ââ¬ÅMore firms are building their own alternative trading systems,ââ¬Â Conary says. ââ¬ÅWe saw an opportunity to provide one to firms that hadnââ¬â¢t already built an ATS. But as more of these systems pop up, we also saw this as a way to aggregate all these pools into one,ââ¬Â he says.
The new ATS provides two levels of trading service. First, it can function as a private crossing mechanism for firms that lack an ATS but want to offer their clients crossing opportunities with other orders being handled by the firm.
At the second level, the platform can act as a crossing mechanism between ââ¬Åpreferredââ¬Â trading partners. Firms that fail to cross their orders at the first level can initiate a trade with other firms of their own choosing at the second.
Also, firms that operate their own crossing systems can trade at the second level with firms of their own choosing. The five investing firms are likely to trade at the second level, sources close to the deal say, with both algorithmic and manual flow.
Levelââ¬â¢s debut comes as Nasdaq, the New York and the ISE stock exchanges all launch crossing platforms for their broker-dealer members.