[phaefele]

Content free - there is really no information in this article outside of the fact they say Norway's Sovereign fund use "Block Trades" which is really what dark-pools are supposed to be all about. Dark pools and block networks have been around for at least the last 5 years, and introduce their own set of issues (not getting your orders filled, showing Goldman Sachs your order on their promise that they won't don't anything with that information :-)

[yummyfajitas]

Well, they do point out why you don't want to be a little player on IEX:

“Trying to find liquidity without having an impact when you’re doing it is an over-arching challenge we will always have,”

Huge players don't want to have a price impact before they trade - they want the price impact to happen after. I.e., it'll happen to the little guy rather than to them.

[tptacek]

A block trade is simply a large coherent set of orders; it's the purchase or sale of a big number of tradable instruments, which usually requires a lot of little orders to execute.

This is pure pedantry on my part, but I wouldn't want the thread to leave the impression that "block trades" are some technological feature of electronic markets. They're a fundamental problem of trading.