Weekly Highlights

• As far as Fed decision days go, Wednesday 7/27 was more subdued than usual and impact on trading costs was contained. For example, projected VWAP curves using historical lookbacks versus actual volume for that day doesn't really suggest dramatic slippage market wide. If anything, earnings news posed more of a trading challenge for volume curves, especially for larger cap names.

• Given the otherwise execution-friendly environment, traders were able to take advantage of more intraspread trading than usual last week in large cap names, which helped to mitigate the persistently elevated spreads throughout the week versus prior weeks this summer.

• Last week, subscribers to IntelligentCross were able to benefit from this intraspread liquidity with over 10 million orders per day in about 850 large cap names on our displayed ASPEN book (free market data feed “IQX”), with average resting times of just over 3 seconds. Of these, more than 2.6 million per day were priced better than the NBBO, offering spread savings of over 30%.

• 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.