Per Briefing.com: "Business Week reports that Reuters seems ready to sell its publicly traded Instinet unit. More important, article speculates that Goldman Sachs is ready to buy." What affect could this have on liquidity?
For Goldman if they could Instinet under 10 bucks a share it is probably a steal. They already bought First Options and SLK a while back, SLK ofcourse owns redi, which merged with Arca, which has redi+ for its trading platform. Buying instinet would give them two more more ecn's effectively giving them most of the ECN flow, eliminate a clearing competitior (instinet) which has probably been pressuring margins and getting some mkt share and they would another option of trading platforms (instinet's) to offer some of their customers who prefer something a bit more shall we say "robust"? The effect on liquidity for traders I would think would be negligible.
I think Bright Trading should buy them out, then they could self-clear, and get a kick ass trading platform just like _______. :eek:
MERGER MERGER MERGER what is the deal with this?? first ISLD-INCA, now maybe this... is there anything goldman doesn't own?? funny to think of what happened to goldman in 1930 and how strong they are now... they still annoy me though, with their arrogance...but then again, what doesn't annoy bungrider sometimes?! HA!
The whole industry is looking to consolidate. Alone they aren't as competitive as they are combined. The bigger the firm, the lower the rates they can offer, since they combine their shares to get discounts from ECN's they don't own, and could offer cheaper rates through the one's they do own cause the higher share volume of the two firms combined reduces the cost per share executed. This wave of consolidation should prove benficial to the day trader in the future, hopefully.