Weekly Highlights

• In last week’s update we mentioned increased trading frictions that were disproportionately affecting smid-cap names. However, market-wide conditions have calmed since then with spreads declining and post-trade quote stability remaining the same or slightly improving. We estimate that slippage vs popular benchmarks, such as VWAP or arrival price, were near their lows for the year last week. Nevertheless, daily volumes and average trade sizes, especially in the smid-cap space, are below April averages which suggests that urgency to trade in specific names may overwhelm the otherwise cheaper trading cost environment.

• Despite the swing from higher to lower volatility in smid-caps as the RVX declined over 4% last week, ASPEN Fee/Fee registered its highest hit rate of the year, and the largest average daily match quantity of orders displayed on our free market data feed, IQX, for smid-cap names.

• Our unique smid-cap liquidity helped drive a new market share record of total consolidated volume at just over 139bps.

• If you're not already using our platform to optimize your trading performance, we encourage you to get in touch. Our displayed quotes are available through our market data feed, IQX, which you can access directly, or through Exegy, MayStreet, Redline, and ACTIV.