Scott Bradley and Adam Sherlock of OneChronos spoke to Global Trading about how their new UK and EU platforms bring the benefits of combinatorial auction technology to Europe’s fragmented liquidity landscape.
- How does market fragmentation affect competition and the ability to trade equities in Europe?
Adam Sherlock (AS): When the same trading experience is available on multiple venues, liquidity gets split and ends up chasing itself around the market. That drives cost without any upside in trading opportunities. But when a new venue offers something that genuinely complements incumbents — fitting the execution preferences of a subset of order flow better than what already exists — that’s fragmentation in service of competition and therefore a better outcome.
Scott Bradley (SB): Fragmentation without differentiation is costly, both in infrastructure spend and opportunity cost. Europe is unusual in that fragmentation is multidimensional: venue, geography and execution protocol all come into play. Competition can be a benefit, but visibility into the true liquidity landscape becomes a challenge. Newcomers have to bring something incremental, and that’s why we’re excited to bring the OneChronos model to the region. Doing more within a single venue makes for a positive newcomer experience.
- The growth of periodic auctions in Europe suggests the market’s needs are being met. Is there room for further innovation?
SB: Periodic auctions are now executing ADVT on par with dark pools, which have been part of the toolkit far longer. They’ve become mainstream. But there’s a difference between progression and innovation. The continued adoption of periodic auctions has mostly involved small, incremental changes heading in the same direction — that’s progression. OneChronos is bringing a “smart market” model that overlays periodic trading, treating time as a discrete function, and solves the uncross differently against a new benchmark. That’s innovation. The combination of features lets intermediaries find valuable liquidity via their SOR — from parent-level blocks down to small child orders — safely, in one place.
AS: The Double Volume Caps under MiFID II may have been the catalyst that launched periodic auctions into the mainstream, but they’ve long since carved out their own space, attracting flow looking for quality fills. OneChronos uses that well-understood wrapper to bring a new experience to market. We strip it back to first principles, solving for a new benchmark — Maximum Notional Price Improvement — and layer on functionality that’s both innovative and complementary to existing auctions and workflows.
- Why is now the right time to launch a new trading venue in Europe?
AS: Since launching our ATS in 2022, OneChronos has become the fastest-growing off-exchange US equities venue and cemented itself as a top-10 ATS late last year. Europe is a natural progression, with similarities in technology and market structure, and it’s not a move we’re making alone — many global buy- and sell-side firms have nudged us in this direction. European equities is also an early stepping stone toward becoming a multi-asset, multi-geography venue operator.
SB: Hyper-growth in the US ATS, combined with strong support from subscribers and their underlying clients, has driven the timing. Clients have seen the benefits of combinatorial auctions in a smart market model, where incremental high-quality, low-reversion fills aggregate into significant performance gains over time. European volumes are buoyant and the market is embracing alternative execution channels. Europe strengthens our global plans — Japanese equities are in the pipeline, and G10 spot FX went live last month. Equities and equity-like trading in Europe hasn’t seen a new venue launched organically like this for some time. The market is ready.
- What’s different about what OneChronos does, and how will the industry access its benefits?
Key features at launch:
- A new and unique benchmark – max notional price improvement
- Speed is off the table — no queue priority
- Latency arbitrage protection, removing real or perceived pick-off risk
- Venue-initiated auction schedule
- No broker preferencing — every auction is equally accessible
- Minimal information leakage, with a locked order book during optimisation
AS: The good news is that clients get the benefits just by turning up with orders — we handle the heavy lifting. The OneChronos MTF takes speed off the table by removing queue priority and eliminating latency arbitrage through a novel market data buffer that time-synchronises EBBO before each uncross. With no queue priority, orders are evaluated on price and size — their ability to provide price improvement — and that improvement is shared equitably between counterparties. Auctions are designed to minimise information leakage: we initiate them rather than order arrival, and individual fills are aggregated into batch publications to the tape. And because we don’t support broker-preferenced matching, all liquidity is equally accessible.
SB: By design, the mechanism aims to deliver differentiated, positive outcomes through a familiar workflow and a simple FIX 4.2 integration. A continuum of venue-initiated periodic auctions, where the entire universe of securities participates simultaneously and no queue priority exists, naturally produces quality outcomes. During the geo-latency data buffer and optimisation phase, the book stays locked, giving subscribers confidence that OneChronos is democratising access to liquidity for all participants. Combining award-winning combinatorial auction theory with the periodic auction protocol delivers an experience grounded in the first principles of best execution.
- What do you expect to see next, and where do we go from here?
SB: We’re excited for a pan-European equities and equities-like launch this quarter, building on the successful FX go-live in March. Data and the ability to evidence good outcomes will be central to our success. OneChronos can provide superior analytics at a speed customers can use to improve routing efficiency and target further performance gains, and our data and analytics teams will deliver the same experience in Europe and beyond. With innovative product launches already gaining traction in the US, OneChronos in Europe is one to watch.
