- BETTER FINANCE calls for restricting “dark” capital market venues to REAL Large-in-scale (LIS) trades, i.e., of more than €100k each, to really prevent them from dealing with “retail” orders.
- Current Payment for Order Flow (PFOF) proposals "surreal" and don’t respond to citizens’ questions.
- A real-time pre-trade Consolidated Tape (CT) of equity order books will put retail investors and brokers at a disadvantage due to “latency arbitrage”. BETTER FINANCE calls for the adoption of the Council’s approach.
BETTER FINANCE, the European Federation of Investors and Financial Services Users, is becoming increasingly concerned by the ongoing "MiFID/MiFIR review" trialogues – interinstitutional negotiations involving the European Commission, Council, and Parliament.
While the discussions are highly technical and complex, it is imperative that retail investors are able to benefit from a level playing field in transparent and regulated European securities trading. Under the current texts however, market structure - a critical component of the CMU Action Plan – is still biased against the interests of retail investors.
Moreover, BETTER FINANCE regrets that the process to date has been dominated by particular industry interest (i.e., large buy-side and sell-side corporations), and is becoming increasingly technical and undemocratic, excluding input from buy-side stakeholders, specifically EU citizens as end investors.
The MiFIR review aimed to enhance transparency and ensure fair competition among execution platforms, by establishing an EU-wide Consolidated Tape for shares, bonds, and ETFs, using real-time data, as well as strengthening market structure requirements and establishing measures to prevent conflicts of interests.
BETTER FINANCE identifies three key concerns for retail investors in the MiFID/MiFIR review:
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- Read the full Press Release below ⬇️