On 30 April 2026, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) published a Call for Evidence on the market structure of European equity markets.
ESMA’s paper has been published to provide stakeholders with an objective description of the European stock market trading landscape, based on Markets in Financial Instruments Regulation transaction data available since 2022. The publication seeks feedback from stakeholders on the identified trends and on the need to address developments identified via legislative or regulatory measures.
Specifically, the paper:
- Describes the evolution of addressable and non-addressable liquidity as well as of on-book vs. off-book trading over the years 2022-2025. ESMA highlights that lit continuous trading has decreased over the period, with such decrease being counterbalanced by the increase of other forms of trading such as closing auctions, frequent batch auctions and systematic internaliser (SI) trading. ESMA also provides an analysis of the distribution of liquidity into different forms of trading on a per country basis.
- Provides a deep dive into some selected developments, which include a focus on dark trading, periodic auctions and SIs.
- Discusses the treatment of topics on a qualitative basis, namely, benchmark transactions and member preferencing.
- Focuses on the concept of addressable liquidity and next steps. More specifically, it analyses this concept under the framework of Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2017/587 with the goal to assess if modifications to the post-trade transparency flagging system are necessary to better delineate this concept.
The deadline for comments is 30 June 2026.
ESMA expects to publish a feedback statement in Q3 2026.