Norway’s $890b wealth fund is taking the rare step of publicly criticizing the proliferation of dark pools, arguing the world’s biggest investors only need one such platform, Bloomberg reported. “There’s a rent extraction from all these intermediaries,” Oeyvind Schanke, head of the fund’s asset strategies, said in a telephone interview. “We are trying to advocate that we need to bring some of this back to where we started by getting the participants to meet, creating a utility that’s there for the sake of transacting institutional-sized blocks.” The fund says institutional investors, and the savers they represent, are wasting money paying multiple fees amid a fragmentation of anonymous trading venues over the past decade.
