Unbelievably F&%$ing Bad Ideas: London Stock Exchange Edition

So it appears the bright young (but evil) men from Lehman have been talking to the bright young (but evil) men from the London Stock Exchange, and they will be working together to make our world a worse place:

London Stock Exchange Group said Thursday that it would create a pan-European trading system in partnership with Lehman Brothers, as the exchange sought to regain its leading role in the region.

The deal creates a system for so-called dark liquidity pool trading. The exchange, known as the LSE, said the trading facility, to be named Baikal, would be open to other investors and was expected to begin operating in the first quarter of 2009. Lehman, based in New York, operates its own dark pool network. It is bringing sophisticated trading technology and an established customer base to the table.

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Dark liquidity pools are off-market trading networks where large orders can be executed anonymously, without divulging prices to public exchanges. Off-market trading has always existed in the form of over-the-counter transactions, but the technology now exists to bring investors together electronically in anonymity. Dark liquidity in European equities is growing rapidly, according to the LSE, and currently accounts for around €12 billion, or nearly $19 billion, in daily trading value.

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David Shrimpton, head of equity market development at the London Stock Exchange, said that the LSE was hoping to bring other investors aboard as partners, and the response to the announcement had been "very positive."

He said it might be possible for a quite a few trading systems to co-exist. "You've got 50 broker dark pools in the U.S.," he added, "and they share about 10 percent of the market."

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Yep. There's a recommendation. Let's get into a new anonymous and unregulated type of exchange pioneered by the Americans, whose toxic financial products currently threaten to poison the world financial systems.

Evil, unregulated, dangerous, and will likely be disasterous.