Recital 1

(1)Regulation (EU) 2024/791 of the European Parliament and the Council ² amended Article 2(1), point (17)(b), of Regulation (EU) No 600/2014 on the criteria to determine what constitutes a ‘liquid market’ for the purposes of Articles 4, 5 and 14 of the latter Regulation by replacing the ‘free float’ criterion by the ‘market capitalisation’ criterion. To reflect that amendment, it is therefore necessary to amend the corresponding provisions of Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2017/567 ³ . When doing so, it is important to ensure consistency with the results of the liquidity assessment in terms of number of liquid shares, percentage of turnover in liquid shares, and the number of transactions in liquid shares obtained so far by applying the free float criterion. The determination of what constitutes a ‘liquid market’ for shares for the purposes of Articles 4, 5 and 14 of Regulation (EU) No 600/2014 should therefore rely on a market capitalisation threshold of EUR 100 million. To ensure consistency with the methodology so far applied for calculating the free float for shares that are only traded on a multilateral trading facility, the market capitalisation of a share should be calculated by multiplying the number of outstanding shares by the price per share. Given that for depository receipts, exchange traded funds (‘ETFs’) and certificates the methodology set out in Delegated Regulation (EU) 2017/567 for calculating the free float is already aligned to the methodology for calculating the market capitalisation, the thresholds for determining liquid markets for those financial instruments should remain unchanged, while the references to ‘free float’ should be replaced by references to ‘market capitalisation’.