Weekly Highlights

• Many measures of execution friction such as spread and post trade stability remained in line last week for most of the market but still worse than at the beginning of the year. However, on the back of tech earnings crescendoing with NVDA last week, the NDX was another story: spreads continued to widen and median trade size declined. As a group, the NDX is very sensitive to an influx of 1 share trading that happens roughly from 10am to 11am daily. For these names last week, that window almost doubled and early trading markouts increased. Nevertheless, venue market shares remained reasonably consistent with the notable exception of a slight decline in block volumes and midpoint liquidity.

• However, regarding NDX names, midpoint liquidity remained strong at IntelligentCross. The platform matched on average at least 1% of the total ADV in over 80 names daily. Combined with over 540 thousand orders per day of any size in these names priced better than the NBBO on arrival displayed on our free market data feed, IQX, IntelligentCross is the one-stop shop for spread-saving liquidity in difficult trading environments. Matches in NDX names on both Midpoint and ASPEN Fee/Fee retained higher post trade stability and lower absolute markouts at 500ms than the exchange average even last week.

• 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.