Weekly Highlights

• Last week, large-cap names continued their August trend of wider spreads, lower volumes, and greater instability versus recent months. Coupled with directionless trading in the SP500 and VIX, increased trading frictions appeared market wide with smid-cap names beginning to show some evidence of increased execution costs as well. In fact, while still below YTD highs, slippage versus all-day VWAP seems to have been increasing steadily since late July for both universes.

• However, as markets were showing signs of becoming more difficult to trade, on Monday, August 7th, IntelligentCross set a new record for market share versus the total consolidated volume (TCV), at just over 156bps. Gains continue to be driven by ASPEN Fee/Fee orders displayed on our free market-data feed, IQX. Last week over 4 million displayed orders of round lots and larger were priced better than the NBBO on arrival, offering almost 30% spread savings daily.

• 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.