More conflicted exchange comments

Here we are on a slow late June morning and we wake up to find this piece of rubbish in our inbox.  A little background first:

On May 11th, Themis Trading published a paper about information leakage on certain data feeds.  The paper focused on US exchanges but made its way to Europe.  European investors acted swiftly and demanded  that certain exchanges in Europe remove some order id numbers that may be disadvantaging their orders.  BATS and Chi-X bear the brunt of this action as European investors shift their order flow to Turquoise (Turquoise is 51% owned by the LSE and the balance owned by 12 brokers).  

Here is how The Independent reported the shift in volume to Turquoise:

Mr Rolet, CEO of the LSE, was handed a gift by rivals on Thursday. It came in the form of a piece of research by Themis Trading which suggested that rival “dark” trading pools – beloved of big institutions needing to buy and sell large tranches of shares in private – weren’t as dark as they appeared to be…Suddenly, from having the sixth biggest player (in terms of trading volumes) when the LSE took control of the Turquoise dark pool in February, the LSE had the number one, if only over the last couple of days.” http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/shining-a-light-on-dark-pools-1980013.html

A gift received by a sixth rate player.  Now, we didn’t expect to be showered with gifts from the LSE but a simple “thank you” would have been nice.  After all, a paper written by “two or three guys” managed to accomplish something that an organization headed by commercial director, Natan Tiefenbrun, couldn’t do by themselves.

So this brings us to the rubbish which was written by that previously mentioned commercial director.  If you care to read his piece, here it is: http://tradeturquoise.blogspot.com/

It seems like Natan is tired because he read a piece written by Kate Welling about Themis Trading (http://www.themistrading.com/article_files/0000/0576/61110_Welling_Weeden_PlayingFair.pdf).  If reading 16 pages gets him tired, maybe he should get some Red Bull.  Much of Natan’s rant against Themis Trading sounds like a defense of HFT.  Maybe that’s because he also has a very conflicted ownership structure with brokers owning almost half of his MTF.

Now , we don’t know if we should feel offended by Natan’s ungrateful comments or honored that such a well-versed, omniscient commercial director of such a major corporation would even waste his precious time on what “two or three guys” have to say.   And,  by the way, Natan, “you’re welcome.”