What are the trading venues preferred for buying and selling shares? Well, stock exchanges are traditionally the most common venue. This provides a public market. Everyone who's buying and everyone who's selling can easily be seen. The number of shares that they're looking to buy and sell can be seen, and the prices that they're willing to trade up are all displayed easily. This makes it a truly public market. It means liquidity is displayed, and there's full transparency. And alternative to this are dark pools, these have gained popularity in recent years. And they provide a private market for buying and selling shares. Here, the liquidity is not displayed. The number of buyer and sellers are not displayed. The number of shares they're looking to trade are not displayed, and neither is the price. This makes it the preferred venue for large trades. If someone was looking to come and sell hundreds of thousands of shares in one company on a traditional stock exchange, that would send the stock price down. However, if those shares were sold in a dark pool and it was matched up to a large number of maybe small buyers, there may be no impact on the stock price at all. These dark pools are often run by banks themselves.

There are other alternative trading systems, often known as ATSs, and the first one is an electronic communication network, sometimes known as an ECN, crossing networks, and others. The idea behind these is to bring buyers and sellers together without going through a stock exchange, and these are often referred to as broker dealers.