London - BlackRock, Inc. and Bloomberg LP have announced a consolidated view for European iShares Exchange Traded Funds (ETF), designed to reduce market fragmentation and improve liquidity and transparency.

A consolidated view lets investors see the best bid/offer prices and where liquidity exists. Bloomberg will utilise its European Composite tickers, which aggregate volume and trading data for reported over-the-counter and exchange traded iShares ETFs. This includes data from 22 venues in Europe where ETFs are traded.

For example, the iShares FTSE 100 is currently traded in Sterling on five European exchanges and in Euros on four European exchanges. To determine the overall volumes traded, an investor previously needed to look up five different tickers to arrive at a Sterling total and four different tickers for a Euro total. Now, this total volume can be viewed on one consolidated ticker for Sterling and one consolidated ticker for Euro. Over the entire iShares product range, this means that investors can now use 517 tickers to view volumes that were previously spread over 1385 tickers.

Leland Clemons, Head of iShares Capital Markets in EMEA commented: "This unique view of ETF volumes will bring added transparency to investors across Europe. iShares is committed to working with our partners to improve the investor experience in this marketplace and initiating these types of advances for the benefit of our clients."

Not all ETF trades are reported. BlackRock stated its support for universal trade reporting of all equity trades including ETFs in its Reform Agenda in October 2011. Under the latest revisions to MiFID, ETF trades will be treated like equity trades for reporting purposes but this is not expected to be implemented until 2014.

"Industry players have long called for the creation of a consolidated tape," said Jean-Paul Zammitt, Bloomberg's Global Head of Core Product. "We're pleased to work with iShares to create the first composite view of the European ETF marketplace."