Instinet Europe Ltd. says that efforts to open up competition in the European trading market, via the region’s new regulatory regime known as MiFID, has seemingly improved execution.

The firm, which is the European agency brokerage subsidiary of Instinet Inc., published the key findings of its best execution policy review, conducted for the first six months operating under MiFID (Nov. 2007 to April 2008).

During that period, the firm reports that it has connected to and is successfully trading on the NYFIX Euro Millennium platform, the only new multi-lateral trading facility to launch during the period. Additionally, Instinet Europe expects to continue to link to new MTFs – including Turquoise, BATS Europe, NASDAQ OMX, and NYSE Euronext’s SmartPool – and systematic internalisers as they are introduced. It also became a member of the Riga, Tallinn and Vilnius stock exchanges.

“Many skeptics suggested that liquidity fragmentation would worsen execution performance. From our review, the introduction of competition in the European stock exchange space has not resulted in any evident deterioration in liquidity opportunities, price formation or execution performance. In fact, by using innovative smart-routing technology, we have been able to exploit significant pricing opportunities on behalf of our clients,” said Richard Balarkas, CEO of Instinet Europe.

The firm reported that: average price improvement was 3.08 basis points for the six-month measurement period, and consistently improved month over month, rising to 3.81 bps in April 2008 from an initial 1.73 bps in November 2007; of the shares traded away from the primary markets on alternative trading venues, Instinet Europe’s clients received price improvement 50.1% of the time (by value traded) and executed at the same price or better 94.2% of the time; by value traded, Instinet Europe executions away from the primary markets in UK, French, German and Dutch equities increased from 11.3% in November 2007 to 27.7% in April 2008. For UK equities alone, in April 2008, Instinet Europe executed 37.3% of its volume away from the London Stock Exchange, versus 14.0% in November 2007.