⚠ Liquidity Can Leak to Foreign VenuesModerate threat

The network effect is powerful but not hermetic. Under European market rules, the shares of large Polish companies can be — and are — traded on pan-European alternative venues and multilateral trading facilities as well as on GPW, and a slice of the order flow in the most liquid blue chips leaks to those cheaper, faster foreign platforms. For the biggest, most internationally-held names, GPW is not quite the only game in town for trading, even if it remains the listing venue.

This is the real, if bounded, erosion at the edge of the monopoly. It bites hardest exactly where the flow is most valuable — the heavily-traded large caps — and it is a structural feature of an integrated European market that will not go away. The saving grace is that the mid-cap and small-cap Polish market, the primary listings, the clearing, and the data all remain firmly GPW's, and the deepest liquidity in Polish names still pools at home. But an investor should not imagine the network effect is a perfect wall; at the top end, it is a wall with gates that competitors keep propping open — a caveat on even a record 551,9m zł year¹.