Sixteen months since the introduction of the European Commission’s markets in financial instruments directive a third of trade orderflow is being misdirected and is failing to achieve the best possible price.

The findings by Equiduct, a European equity trading platform that runs a liquidity fragmentation analytics service monitoring European execution venues' pre-trade liquidity data, show that in January €97bn ($133bn) of executed trade - or 33.4% of the total value of trades across 500 securities - could have secured a better price by trading elsewhere.