Weekly Highlights

• With the first week of trading in 2024 over, overall execution conditions seem to have started the year largely tame, but with a few notable areas of friction. While volumes have returned from holiday lows, spreads were close to the highs of their range since November and post trade quote stability declined in the later part of the day. Though overall average trade sizes remained stable or slightly improved, ETFs saw a decline especially near the close as the percent of one share trades rose from around 9% to 13% of all trades since November. Finally, as we noted last week, there remains an outsized contribution to total volumes by a few names such as BETS.

• IntelligentCross began the year with its third best week ever for shares matched against orders displayed on our free market data feed IQX. Subscribers utilizing IQX continue to benefit from spread saving liquidity that can enhance algorithmic benchmark performance. Last week, IQX orders were at or better than the NBBO 89% of the day. Roundlot and larger orders displayed on IQX arrived priced better than the NBBO over 3.2mm times per day and over 4.9mm times per day for orders of median trade size and larger.

• If you haven't yet leveraged our platform to boost your trading outcomes, we urge you to connect with us. Our displayed ASPEN quotes are available through our market data feed, IQX, which can be accessed directly or via providers such as Exegy, MayStreet, Redline, and ACTIV.