Why should Dark Pools be prohibited?

Essay from the year 2017 in the subject Economics - Finance, grade: 1,7, University of Strathclyde (Business School), course: International Financial Markets and Banking, language: English, abstract: The following paper will introduce dark pools and present as well as discuss some of the most important arguments in favour of prohibiting dark pools.Dark pools have been in existence since the 1980s with the first one being founded by Instinet in 1986. However, according to Zhu (2014), there was little interest in dark pools as they only had a very low market share. The author states that this changed in 2007 when both the United States of America as well as the European Union implemented new legislation – the Regulation National Market System (Reg NMS) and the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) respectively – which led to a significant increase in the number of both dark pools and trades on these platforms.The International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) (2010) generally defines dark pools as electronic liquidity pools which do not publicly provide any share prices before the trade. This lack of pre-trade transparency thus enables equity investors to trade privately, contrary to public stock exchanges, often referred to as lit markets. According to Lovén (2013), the main purpose of dark pools is twofold, firstly to minimise market impact and secondly to offer improvements of trading prices. To achieve this, dark pools usually execute orders at the midpoint of the bid-offer spread with the latter being sourced from lit exchange prices.