The Magazine

	Print
	Email
	Text size
	Comment

Brickles foresees end of LSE era

By Nick Britton on August 12 2008

Simon Brickles, the chief executive of PLUS Markets Group, says competition from smaller exchanges including his own has seen ‘the end of the equity trading monopoly in the UK’. He predicts that by early 2009, neither the London Stock Exchange (LSE) nor any of its rivals will handle more than 50 per cent of trade in UK equities.

Former AIM chief Brickles has drawn confidence from PLUS’s first-half figures, which reveal shares worth £16.9 billion were traded on the market between January and June. That gives PLUS a market share of two per cent of total trading in UK equities.

Since introducing a new trading platform last year, PLUS has increased its share of trade in FTSE Small Cap companies to ten per cent by value, while it claims ‘almost 50 per cent’ of the trade in AIM stocks dual-trading on PLUS.

At the larger end of the market, the LSE is facing increased competition from rival exchanges Turquoise and Chi-X.

Its total share of trade in UK equities is now less than two-thirds, according to data from Thomson Reuters.

Comments [0]