RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:Trading volumedoggy, here's cut and paste of a response I provided Maggs with back in December. Hope it helps.
Maggs, there is a few of those 'secondary exchanges' as I call it...others are calling them 'the dark side', they are basically off-exchanges that are allowing buyers and sellers to shield an order from the public until it gets filled and printed. This means that small investors looking at the volume on the TSX or TSX-V at any given moment won't see the real volume even if you have 'real-time' quotes.
There is two category, the 1st one is for 'crossing network' and deals with large volume of shares and the 2nd category is for handling smaller trades.
You can imagine that big traders, banks, funds, etc...will be using those platforms especially when they want to buy or dump large quantity of shares without letting the mass know right away....actually all majors trading houses and banks owns parts of those secondary exchange platforms since it is also allowing them to reduce their transactional cost.
For my part, I don't understand why the regulators are allowing those hidden exchanges to even exist but...anyway....
Here's a partial list;
Alpha (https://www.tsx.com/trading/tsx-alpha-exchange?lang=en), CX2, TriAct (https://matchnow.ca/), Omega (https://omegaats.com/), CHI-X (https://business.nasdaq.com/chi-x-canada) & Aequitas NEO (https://www.aequitasneo.com/en/home).
Hope it helps.
Read more at https://www.stockhouse.com/companies/bullboard?symbol=v.spn&postid=29114281#jBmAFYXO3Aq69dPg.99