The Tokyo Stock Exchange on Tuesday began allowing smaller price increments on shares of about 80 of Japan's biggest companies as the bourse seeks to win back business from private trading venues.

Topix 100 members whose shares cost between ¥1,000 and ¥5,000 now trade in ¥0.5 price movements, down from ¥1. This includes Honda Motor Co. and Japan Tobacco Inc.

Shares in the gauge priced less than ¥1,000, such as Mizuho Financial Group Inc., can trade in ¥0.1 bands, a tenth of the previous size.

Investors in Japan can already trade in smaller increments using the country's two alternative platforms that display prices, SBI Japannext and Chi-X Japan Ltd.

"This would be the way the exchange looks at fighting back," Mikey Hsia, a sales trader at Sunrise Brokers LLP, said last Thursday. "Naturally, this will add to the question whether it benefits one type of market participant over another. But in the long run, if overall liquidity is boosted in the underlying assets we are trading, the net beneficiary will be everyone trading in that arena."

Profits among market makers, the professional traders who facilitate buying and selling shares, were reduced when the U.S. narrowed tick sizes to pennies from sixteenths of a dollar more than a decade ago.

The change, known as decimalization, was one of the changes that fueled the rise of electronic trading in the world's largest market. Today, firms known as high-frequency traders are under scrutiny amid allegations they've rigged trading in American equities.

Tuesday's changes are the second in a three-part plan by the Tokyo bourse seeking to offer better liquidity and shorten waiting times to process orders.

In January, the exchange reduced tick sizes on some shares, while keeping the smallest increment at ¥1.

In mid-2015, the exchange will analyze the impact of the smaller ticks and decide whether to do more.

Supporters of the U.S. testing bigger tick sizes say it will encourage market makers to buy and sell more shares and create conditions that would persuade more companies to go public.

Opponents of the change, including Fidelity Investments, say it will cause investors to pay more when they buy the shares of small-cap companies.

The trial, announced last month by the Securities and Exchange Commission, will last a year.

High-speed trading's impact on financial markets was viewed negatively by 50 percent of those surveyed in a Bloomberg Global Poll this month, compared with 27 percent who see it positively.

Dark pools, private venues often owned by brokers that don't publish bid and ask prices, received negative marks from 53 percent of respondents, versus 23 percent positive.

High-frequency traders are valuable because they add liquidity and the TSE hasn't received any complaints about their behavior, Isao Hasegawa, then-director of the exchange's equity department, said in April. Japan doesn't have the excessive market fragmentation seen in the U.S., he said.

"We also expect liquidity to be more concentrated on the TSE following the tick size changes with the PTS's losing market share," Daiwa Securities Group Inc. quantitative analyst Mainak Sarkar wrote in a June report.