Euronext has created the first trans-national exchange in Europe by successfully integrating four separate cash marketplaces on an open federal basis, attracting a large number of Europe's blue-chip companies.

Horizontal integration with vertical efficiency.
Euronext has an integrated and open market model architecture to provide clients with cost-efficient and flexible trading facilities, enabling them to benefit from Euronext's Straight-Through Processing (STP) service, from order routing to clearing and settlement.

 
Cross-border harmonisation
Our pan-European model has initiated harmonisation across the Euronext countries with the introduction of a harmonised European Rule Book. This has reduced the compliance burden of our clients considerably, ultimately reducing execution costs. The harmonisation of rules and procedures was facilitated by a process of close co-operation between Euronext and the regulators of the financial markets in each of the EU states where it operates: the AFM (The Netherlands), AMF (France), CBFA (Belgium), CMVM (Portugal) and the FSA (United Kingdom).

Reducing costs for cross-border trading
Over the years, Euronext has passed on the synergies of its single market to its clients, with fee reductions of up to 30% on average. As its model develops further, Euronext has also introduced a common scaled fee structure for all markets, stimulating the growth of trading volumes. The Euronext model will be completely finalised with the integration of the settlement platforms in Q2 2008, which will create a truly single orderbook, also for dual listed companies, encouraging further cross-border trading in Europe.
 

A fair and orderly market.
As a Regulated Market, Euronext operates a fair and orderly market. The real-time monitoring performed by Euronext Cash Market Operations and Customer Technical Support is formally enforced with respect to our trading rules and procedures, which are approved by our five regulators. This regulatory and organisational system gives Euronext the power to efficiently manage crisis situations or extraordinary circumstances. On a day-to-day basis, Euronext manages listing, trading, corporate events, data dissemination and reporting activities.

A transparent market for all market players.
Euronext provides full transparency to the market by offering a full real-time pre-trade and trade reporting market data feed through the data vendors. This allows investors to have equal access to the same information and to gain visibility on the depth of the orderbook and best execution. Euronext is already compliant with the MiFID transparency requirements and will be able to help its clients with this new challenge introduced by the Directive.
 

Euronext has developed a highly sophisticated market model adapted to all asset classes and facilitating the different trading strategies of different types of investors. A wide range of order types is on offer at Euronext, from limit orders, stop limit orders, stop loss orders, market orders, iceberg orders, minimum quantity and block trades to VWAP trades. Euronext benefits from a world-renowned execution system and one of the longest track records in this domain.

Quality of execution has been further improved by Liquidity Provider schemes, which ensure a permanent flow of liquidity and optimum trading conditions for all markets, and especially in products/stocks lacking natural liquidity. A specific status has been designed to support activity in our most recent market, Alternext, launched in April 2005 for mid and small caps.

As the leading European stock exchange, Euronext plays a unique role in providing deep and liquid markets for all categories and sizes of market participants. The Euronext market model has encouraged the diversification of trading strategies (including algorithmic trading and proprietary trading) in the Euronext orderbook, attracting a large variety of order flows including retail, institutional, proprietary trading and hedge funds.

Euronext has become the leading European market with a market share of more than 29% in terms of number of equity transactions as well as turnover.

Over the years, the Euronext federal model has also favoured the development of cross-border order flow, which now represents around 23% of our total equity activity, compared to 8% in 2002.

Euronext has attracted a large number of blue-chip companies (43 companies from the FTSEurofirst 80, 25 companies from Dow Jones Euro STOXX) giving investors access to a market capitalisation of €2,600 billions.

The development of this large pool of liquidity offers our clients guaranteed execution against the lowest possible price.

Optimal price discovery.
During more than 65% of the trading day, the best limit in the Euronext orderbook is at its lowest possible, 1 tick for all our most liquid stocks.

Depth.
More than 96% of introduced orders, on our most liquid stocks, are executed at the best available price thanks to the enhanced quality of our orderbook. The available disclosed quantity in the orderbook at the best limit is on average €240 000, representing nearly 10 times the average trade size.
Euronext is one of the first exchanges to have introduced stop and iceberg orders, providing undisclosed depth and increasing the available quantity by a further 35% on average.

The Euronext orderbook is one of the most dynamic orderbooks in the world with the best limit being refreshed every 7 seconds for our most liquid stocks.

Low intraday volatility.
Our highly liquid orderbook guarantees a smooth execution dynamic. On average the price of the stock does not deviate more than 0.16% for all stocks listed on Euronext (see graph below).

Low volatility is paramount for publicly traded companies, reducing their cost of capital and enhancing their ability to raise capital, and for investors, who would otherwise be buying artificially high or selling at artificially low prices.