Luxembourg, 21/06/2013 (Agence Europe) - On Friday 21 June 2013, the ECOFIN Council agreed without debate on the broad consensus on review of the MiFID Directive (2004/39/EC) on financial instrument markets (see EUROPE 10869). The agreement gives a negotiating mandate to the future Lithuanian Presidency for talks with the European Parliament.
The member states have introduced measures to provide greater transparency about trades. Dark pool trading will be restricted to 8% of total trading and 4% by platform type. The revised directive foresees the creation of organised trading systems, a new type of trading platform. These OTF will be subject to the same transparency rules as other trading platforms. The UK has managed to get OTF to be authorised to deal in shares, a measure that France is unhappy about and the European Parliament did not include in the Ferber Report (see EUROPE 10719). Access to trading platforms must be non-discriminatory. The Council has not laid down any minimum time that orders must be kept for. The EP wants to minimise the negative impact of high frequency trading (HFT) on market stability and therefore wants players to keep their orders for at least half a second. The draft document gives the option of setting limits on holdings in the commodity markets. A reporting obligation has been introduced for derivatives in commodities for each category of trader in order to enable regulators to measure how speculation affects the commodity markets. (MB/transl.fl)