Quantifying the surge in European Equities
In 2025, bilateral liquidity was the buzzword in every article and on every conference agenda focused on Equities. In the first eight months of 2026, explosive growth in both the availability and size of quotes, as well as data volumes, shows the buzz has become reality. On the Reactive Markets platform, we have measured YoY volume growth of over 300%.
So, what is driving this acceleration in bilateral trading? What execution benefits does it unlock and where is the market heading next?
Make your choice: algo execution vs. instant risk transfer
Block trade volumes have soared on our platform in 2026. While algorithms still dominate the bulk of flow in the market overall, bilateral liquidity now offers a powerful addition or alternative: instant risk transfer.
The decision now rests on execution quality. Traders can run the analysis: does paying the spread to transfer $10 million in risk instantly beat the volume-weighted average price of working that order over a longer duration?
Regardless of the method chosen, bilateral liquidity has an important role to play. SI liquidity has become a key liquidity source for broker algo execution, with algo child orders targeting tailored liquidity from SIs, optimised for specific algo strategies or market conditions.
Bilateral trading has unlocked newfound transparency: it generates the data needed to observe how the market reacts when a client executes with one market maker over another. This visibility has shattered the assumption that all ELPs and market makers operate homogeneously. In reality, their pricing models, available size, symbol coverage and risk management profile are surprisingly uncorrelated.
This lack of correlation makes aggregation incredibly powerful. When a client connects to a single liquidity provider, they are likely to see a 20% fill rate at the midpoint. By increasing the number of LPs competing for that order flow to a minimum of four, midpoint availability jumps to over 40%.
Market makers now have the power to stream highly bespoke liquidity to any client, updating feeds fractions of a second at a time, without limits. But a deluge of raw data is useless if clients can't consume it. For the buy-side, visibility is everything - traders want to see bilateral liquidity right in their EMS before they interact.
Reactive enables market makers to push IOIs straight into client execution systems. Operating at end-to-end latency of low double-digit microseconds, our platform ensures that when liquidity is present, clients can seamlessly interact with it, fostering absolute trust and conviction in their execution outcomes.
The analytics generated by direct trading go far beyond traditional Transaction Cost Analysis (TCA). By capturing every tick of data, Reactive Markets enables lower-level execution optimisation.
By revealing exactly when individual market makers provide maximum size and quote availability, we empower transparent dialogue. A client can now engage a market maker with concrete, actionable metrics:
“You see 10% of our wallet today; if you increase your midpoint availability by 10% in the $100-250k order size bucket, you stand to win significantly more flow.”
As LPs can create dedicated, bespoke pricing feeds for individual clients, they can adjust their risk parameters for that specific client without exposing themselves to the broader market. This creates a virtuous cycle of customised, highly efficient execution.
As we look toward the future, three trends will define the market:
The shift is no longer on the horizon; it has arrived. Bilateral liquidity is fundamentally upgrading the plumbing of the European equities market, offering the transparency, speed and price improvement that the modern buy-side demands.
