New York-headquartered Liquidnet, the off-exchange trading platform that connects buy-side traders to liquidity pools for anonymous and timely block trade equity executions, announced this week that its trading volume for Asia Pacific, as of November 1^st 2010, had risen 10.8 per cent on the whole of last year. Latest figures released show that USD11.3 billion was made over the last nine months, compared to USD10.2 billion in 2009. Liquidnet is busy making inroads into the Asia market as its membership continues to grow – when Hedgeweek last spoke to the firm in September, sixteen of the twenty members that had joined this year were Asia-based. Over 180 are now connected. According to the official press release, the average size of trade in October was more than USD1.3 million, whilst Liquidnet’s daily liquidity across Asia Pacific was, on average, USD8 billion. Asian traders are becoming more receptive to “dark pools” of liquidity as it enables them to trade quickly, thereby reducing impact on margin. Crucially, large institutional players like hedge funds can execute large trades without revealing themselves to the markets. Speaking about the encouraging figures for 2010, Head of Liquidnet Asia Pacific, Lee Porter, said: “This is a significant achievement for Liquidnet in Asia Pacific, in spite of the very challenging trading conditions in the summer months, as we have broken through last year’s volumes with almost two months of trading still remaining in the year.” Porter added that the figures “also highlight how the buy side has embraced alternative trading platforms in the region as a valuable source of liquidity.”