Get the best price for your retail orders

Euronext Best of Book

Euronext’s Best of Book (BoB) is a Best Execution service exclusively for retail investors.
It provides the best prices available in Europe for their equity orders through the main European stock exchange thanks to dedicated liquidity providers.

Are you looking for Best Execution?

Ask your broker to send your orders to Euronext’s Best of Book

 

  • Invest on the Exchange in a safe, regulated and supervised environment.

  • Trade against the full range of retail and institutional investors, with access to the best prices

  • Access on the Euronext central order book, where the liquidity is the deepest in Europe

  • Benefit from a pool of liquidity providers dedicated to retail orders, whose mission is to offer you the best quotes available

  • Measure the execution quality of your orders yourself with reports from an independent data provider

Best of Book is available for stocks through the following Euronext regulated markets: Amsterdam, Brussels, Dublin, Lisbon, Oslo and Paris (not yet available on the Milan market).

You can be sure you are getting the best price for your orders. BoB prices are measured against the European Best Bid and Offer (EBBO).

The EBBO is a benchmark price based on third-party best execution analysis. It is the best possible price available across all the European venues on which the instrument could have been traded at the time of the trade.

Euronext helps brokers offer best execution to retail investors

On average in 2023

98.82% of the time

BoB offers best execution for orders

€98,687,693

saved by retail investors

12.98% of the time,

execution was better than EBBO

(source: Iress Market Data)

€3.66

Average price improvement per trade

Why is our Best of Book a better model for retail investors?

Payment For Order Flow (PFOF)

Is free trading really free for retail investors?

  • To protect retail investors, European regulators have implemented a law to limit a practice called “Payment For Order Flow”.  Payment For Order Flow involves a broker being remunerated for routing its own client’s orders (the investor) to a specific trading venue. This can be a trading platform or a select group of counterparties. Examples of such counterparties are Systematic Internalisers or High-Frequency Traders.

     
  • The European regulation bans intermediaries from receiving any benefit, whether monetary or not, for routing client orders to a particular venue if it would create a conflict of interestTo get round this, some platforms have developed set-ups that indirectly benefit the intermediary. These set ups resemble a Payment For Order Flow model.

     
  • One example is the ‘zero fee’ mechanism. Platforms offer free trading to intermediaries  sending orders from retail (non-professional) investors.  These platforms charge relatively high fees for accessing the platform to market makers (the firms who will buy or sell those orders). Market makers are happy to pay the platform fees since they will be the single counterparty to the trade. That means that they can choose the execution price and time of the retail investor’s order, giving them an advantage over the investor. This is in contrast to trading on an exchange, where multiple market makers compete to provide the best price for the investors.

     
  • In these models, market makers ultimately benefit from a better execution price than retail investors. This practice is therefore unfavourable to retail investors. It does not meet best execution requirements.

Euronext Quant Research papers

BoB versus Apex: No free lunch - trading on Apex more costly than on Best of Book

VBBO Trading: a best execution solution for retail investors or for market makers?

Contacts

Euronext Equities Team

equitiesteam@euronext.com