FACTBOX: New trading venues in Europe

LONDON (Reuters) - The European Union's markets in financial instruments directive (MiFID), which came into force in November 2007, is set to alter the exchange landscape dramatically as low-cost trading platforms emerge.

Here are the key new pan-European trading ventures that stand to challenge the monopolies of European stock exchanges:

Chi-X Europe

-- Launched in October 2006, the first live, pan-European equity multilateral trading facility (MTF) aims to take on the three major European exchanges with its faster and cheaper trading engine. It has gained some 13 percent of FTSE blue-chips by paying for liquidity -- paying 0.2 basis points for order that add liquidity and charging 0.3 basis points for orders that remove liquidity.

Chi-X Europe, owned by Nomura Holdings' (8604.T: Quote, Profile, Research) broker agency Instinet and some 14 financial institutions, trades component stocks of the FTSE 100 .FTSE, AEX 25 .AEX, DAX 30 GDAXI, CAC 40 .FCHI, SMI 20 .SSMI and OMX Stockholm 30 . It aims to have 25 percent of the London market share a year from now.

It also expects to have 15 percent of Germany's Dax, Amsterdam's AEX and France's CAC 40.

Euro-Millennium

-- U.S. broker Nyfix launched the third dark-pool (anonymous) equities-trading platform Euro-Millennium in March 2008.

It counts investment banks BNP Paribas (BNPP.PA: Quote, Profile, Research), Citi (C.N: Quote, Profile, Research), Credit Suisse (CSGN.VX: Quote, Profile, Research), JPMorgan (JPM.N: Quote, Profile, Research), Merrill Lynch (MER.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and UBS (UBSN.VX: Quote, Profile, Research), as well as fund houses Allianz, Baring, CA Cheuvreus, DWS, Insight, Resolution and Schroder as members of its advisory board.  Continued...