Weekly Highlights

• Market-wide spreads remained elevated last week, as execution conditions remained more difficult than at the beginning of the year. Some of this directly relates to earnings season, with over 600 companies having reported last week. As a group, these names showed a slight shift away from the dark and towards maker-taker venues, compressing volumes available at the mid versus how they traded prior to last week.

• Volatility in the group also compressed quote durations, as the number of quotes lasting more than a ½ second in these names declined and post-trade markouts increased on balance. Nevertheless, average trade sizes increased for these names and perhaps more interestingly, so did continuous volumes versus the closing auctions on average.

• Despite the shift away from the dark and towards maker-taker in these names, IntelligentCross continued to provide spread saving liquidity in this active group. We traded over 1 percent of the volume on average daily in the majority of these names in midpoint and in about ⅓ of them on ASPEN last week. Both products continued to have exchange beating post-trade performance in markouts and quote stability 500ms after the trade that increased on balance relative to the exchange average as the week progressed. This helped drive the platform to its best hit rates of the year as well as the most daily matched quantity of demi-block or greater in both large and smid cap names.

• 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.