It seems the buy side isn't quite shying away from broker-sponsored dark pools of liquidity as some have predicted.

In fact according to Rishi Nangalia, Managing Director and Head of Business Development for Goldman Sachs Electronic Trading, the firm has been seeing record volumes being executed in its Sigma X dark pool.

Sigma X saw a record 531 million shares trade in a single day on September 18th while the entire month of September saw an average daily volume of 332 million shares per day.

"Overall our volumes have grown and participation in our trading systems has grown. This has led to an increase in our dark pool volumes as well," says Nangalia. "Dark pools will likely continue to increase their share of volume even in times of volatility."

Goldman saw record U.S. equity volumes reach 1.8 billion traded in a single day through its GS Electronic Trading channels on September 19th.

He adds that during these volatile trading times buy side behavior has become more urgent, getting trades done faster and utilizing faster algorithms but he hasn't seen a single instance of a client not wanting to participate in a dark pool.

Time though is coming into play more and more. "In times of volatility the probability of time impact is much higher and people are willing to incur higher market impact because it means lower timing risk," explains Nangalia. He says algorithms are being accessed more as traders want to get orders done faster.

"The buy side is definitely expecting a lot of heavy lifting to be done by the sell side," says Nangalia, adding that this could be in the form of making sure clients aren't executing trades on the SEC banned list or making sure the sell side is providing enough inventory.

"But the buy side is more aware. They aren't assuming anything, they're asking a lot more questions and want quality execution providers," he notes.