While Canada’s financial regulators haven’t hammered out an overarching set of rules governing dark pools, Nomura Holdings subsidiary Instinet Inc. is launching two new products in Canada on Wednesday to facilitate the “dark” trades that don’t alert the broader market to buying and selling activity.

Peter Coffey, managing director at Instinet Canada Cross Ltd., says the two dark pools were created in response to demand from institutional shareholders who want to trade large blocks of shares without suffering price movements as other investors become aware of trading patterns.

“While the Canadian equity market’s recent evolution has by and large been a positive, it has come at the expense of block trading,” Mr. Coffey said, noting that block trading has declined to about 15% of the marketplace from 40% a decade ago as algorithm-driven electronic trading has taken hold.

A recent report on the Canadian market from Boston-based consultant Aite Group noted discontent among buy-side investors related to a “decrease in broker support for moving large blocks” of shares and other securities.

One of Instinet Canada’s products, which Mr. Coffey said have received approval from regulators, aims to aggregate small orders into block trades at a designated trigger size and then price them at the mid-point.

The other will lock in matched orders at a specified time in the morning, and then have the executions priced and printed after the market close when the stock’s volume-weighted average price can be determined using the day’s consolidated market data fees from all visible or “lit” Canadian markets.

The ad-hoc approval of dark pool products has surprised and confused some industry players who had expected Canadian regulators to wait for the rules on dark pools to be clearly spelled out before allowing more in the market.

Canada’s financial regulators have been mulling broad rules for dark pools since 2009. The latest comment period on rules proposed by the Canadian Securities Administrators, an umbrella organization for provincial regulators, remains open until June 16.

Industry players say it could be the end of the year before a central set of rules is in place.