Home / Venues
Where things actually trade
A market is not an abstraction — it is a specific place with rules, opening hours and a clearing arrangement. These are the venues referenced across the directory.
Auction houses
Bonhams
British auction house with particular strength in classic cars, motorcycles, whisky and militaria.
Christie’s
Sotheby’s counterpart and rival. Between them the two houses set the visible top end of the art market, though most art…
DVLA registrations
The government agency that creates and sells personalised vehicle registration marks, running timed online auctions and…
Sotheby’s
One of the two dominant international auction houses for art, jewellery, wine and increasingly anything with a collecto…
Vehicle remarketing auctions
BCA, Manheim, Copart and similar: the wholesale layer of the used vehicle market, where fleets, lease companies and ins…
Brokers & dealers
Exchanges
Baltic Exchange
The London membership body that publishes the daily shipping rate assessments underlying the Baltic Dry Index, and the …
Centralised crypto exchanges
Venues such as Coinbase, Kraken and Binance that hold customer assets and match orders internally. UK access is restric…
CME Group
The largest derivatives exchange in the world: WTI crude, US Treasuries, interest rate futures, grain, live cattle and …
Intercontinental Exchange
Owner of the Brent crude benchmark, the London softs contracts (cocoa, coffee, sugar) and the New York Stock Exchange. …
Liv-ex
The global exchange for fine wine merchants, publishing the indices and transaction data that give the wine trade unusu…
Lloyd's of London
Not an insurance company but a marketplace, where syndicates of capital compete to underwrite risks brought to them by …
London Metal Exchange
The global reference market for industrial metals, and the last major exchange in Europe with an open-outcry trading fl…
London Stock Exchange
The UK’s primary market for shares, investment trusts, ETFs and gilts, spanning the Main Market and the smaller-company…
Power exchanges
EPEX SPOT, Nord Pool and N2EX, where electricity is bought and sold for delivery in specific half-hour and hourly block…
Marketplaces
eBay
The original mass-market venue for second-hand and collectible goods. Thirty years of completed-listing data makes it t…
Estate agency market
UK residential property is listed through agents and aggregated on portals, but the actual trade happens through a soli…
Freelance marketplaces
Upwork, Fiverr, Toptal and their many niche equivalents: venues where human time is listed, priced, escrowed and rated …
Over-the-counter
Interbank OTC market
Not a place at all: a decentralised web of banks, brokers and electronic platforms dealing directly with each other. Fo…
Specialist dealer networks
For assets with no exchange — rare coins, wine, watches, royalties, domain names — a small population of dealers and br…
Peer-to-peer
Decentralised exchanges
Automated market makers such as Uniswap that hold no customer funds and match no orders — trades execute against a pool…
LETS & barter networks
Local Exchange Trading Schemes and their modern app-based descendants, where members trade goods and skills using a mut…
Registries
Environment Agency & natural capital registries
The public registers governing abstraction licences, biodiversity net gain units and woodland carbon. Rights created by…
Ofcom spectrum auctions
The regulator that auctions rights to use bands of the radio spectrum, in multi-round sealed processes that have raised…
UK Debt Management Office
The agency that issues government debt on behalf of HM Treasury, running the gilt auctions that fund the deficit and op…
UK Emissions Trading Scheme
The post-Brexit successor to the UK’s participation in the EU carbon market. Government sets the cap, auctions allowanc…