By Michael Flaherty
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Privately held electronic marketplace Liquidnet plans to launch a program trading product and hopes to complete its roll-out in 2007, its chief executive Seth Merrin told Reuters on Tuesday.
Program trading is a popular electronic mechanism that accounts for more than 57 percent of the New York Stock Exchange's average trading volume, according to the NYSE's latest statistics.
Liquidnet, which Merrin started in 2001, allows institutional buyers and sellers to anonymously negotiate large block trades with each other without intermediaries, such as floor traders.
Liquidnet said its first-quarter average U.S. share volume was 44.5 million shares, up 62 percent from the year-ago period. Average U.S. share volume so far in the second quarter is 55 million shares, Merrin said, speaking at the Reuters Exchanges and Trading Summit in New York.
Merrin said that in addition to geographic expansion, he plans to grow the company's product base by adding program trading.
Program trading uses predetermined formulas to trigger buying and selling of large baskets of stocks.
"Nobody else comes close to the amount of liquidity we have," Merrin said.
© Thomson Reuters 2008. All rights reserved.
| Paper | Aug 20 - 21, 2008 | Manufacturing |
| Japan Investment | Jul 01 - 2, 2008 | Country Summits |
| Global Real Estate | Jun 23 - 25, 2008 | Real Estate |
| Consumer and Retail | Jun 16 - 18, 2008 | Consumer Retail |
| Investment Outlook | Jun 09 - 12, 2008 | Financial Services / Exchanges |
