Sunday, February 25, 2007

Interesting Financial Fact of the Day

I was listening to one of Sun's excellent Mifid PodCasts on the plane to Copenhagen. (Wow... I never thought I'd compliment Sun!)

They were interviewing Andrew Allwright from Reuters.

The conversation turned to how Reuters plan to support Mifid's requirement for post-trade transparency. He described how, today, Reuters provide information on prices by using a concatenation of an equity's symbol (e.g. "VOD" for Vodafone) and the trading venue at which the trade was made (eg. "L" for London"). Hence: VOD.L.

He explained that, when trades from other venues (e.g. those internalised by large institutions or on other trading facilities) are published, he anticipates that Reuters will make those streams available by assigning new suffices to each of the venues.  (Implicit in the conversation was that they already do that for some of the existing exchanges)

He then made a very interesting point: Reuters also provide an aggregated feed, with the "X" suffix: So "VOD.X" carries information on trades from all venues that Reuters receive feeds from.

This interested me because, when I want to check the price of William Morrison stock, I use the MRW.L symbol in Yahoo Finance.  Perhaps this means I'm not seeing a full picture?

I just tried MRW.X on Yahoo, to see if I could get figures that included all other venues where Morrison shares trade. Yahoo didn't want to play ball.

Oh well.... maybe I should try again on November 1.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

The Reuters Instrument Code often referred to as the RIC or annoyingly the RIC code :) is only one identifier used to identify securities. For a search where you want to bring back all trades in a security in all markets the ISIN (International Securities Identifying Number) is probably a better bet. Also I'm not sure the VOD.X trick is reliable. VOD.X would match VOD.L, VOD.DE and VOD.N. VOD.L and VOD.DE are the same security (ISIN GB00B16GWD56) but VOD.N is a different one (ISIN US92857W2098) but is the same security as VODN.MX but that wouldn't match VOD.X

Richard Brown said...

Interesting.... thanks Brian :-)