Weekly Highlights

• Despite a subdued VIX and largely quiet moves across sectors and security types, last week, being a Fed week, brought higher spreads across the board and lower post-trade quote stability during the later portion of the day. Interestingly, it wasn't necessarily rate-sensitive names that saw the biggest increases in trading frictions, but rather energy names, while ADRs remained more in line with the easier conditions of the week prior.

• With all the twists and turns of a typical Fed week (or any week, really), how can you keep your execution tactics on point? By being flexible and adapting to market conditions. That’s why we’ve pioneered real-time calibration of our discreet matching logic in Midpoint with a process called “Intraday Optimization”. The outcomes show that you don’t have to sacrifice performance for liquidity. We now evaluate market conditions approximately 66 million times per day and adjust our matching frequencies accordingly. This has resulted in an incremental 10 million shares per day double counted, and over 45,000 additional matches per day with zero markouts to 500ms. We call this “Performant Liquidity”. You can read more about it here.

• If you haven't yet leveraged our platform to boost your trading outcomes, we encourage 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.