Market Design—A Practitioner’s Perspective

Abstract

Financial markets have fundamentally changed with the application of information technology. Market development has changed accordingly. It has become a design process; it moved into the focus of market design. The objects of market design are market models, trading services, and trading systems—their analysis, description, and specification. Market design refers to and is guided by market microstructure with its market model schemes and classifications, market-model-related findings, and results on topics of market liquidity. Market design as an approach for market development is applied by market operators who as a business build and run trading systems. Xetra, a trading system, has been operated by Deutsche Börse since 1997 and is the leading trading venue for German equities and exchange-traded funds in Europe. Some key concepts and innovations of Xetra are shown and explained as example cases for market design in this article: how market model schemes, different measures of liquidity management, and modification and extension of the hybrid market model contributed to the success of Xetra over many years.