Weekly Highlights

• With the 20:20 hindsight of Monday 8/5, it’s clear the last week of July set the stage for quite the August. ETFs continued to gain market share at the expense of smid-caps as volatility increased. This rotation came with substantial execution frictions, including widening spreads and greatly declined post-trade quote stability market wide. Although momentum and growth names remained under pressure, energy and manufacturing sectors suffered more from a trading cost perspective. Perhaps the only mitigation to what was likely a difficult week for TCA was that, outside of the Fed announcement, volume curves did not shift dramatically nor did average trade size fluctuate significantly.

• IntelligentCross had our best week of the year for average daily match quantities and our best week ever for average notional traded. This success was driven in part by our subscribers’ ability to find immediate and sizable liquidity during these more stressful conditions. Last week, IntelligentCross achieved our best week ever for average daily match quantities of demi-block and larger, and the best week of the year for daily match quantities in IOC order types.

• In a week that saw FINRA-reported dark trades with their lowest market share of July, we also had our best week ever for order quantity displayed on our free market data feed, IQX, with the most displayed orders of round lot size and larger priced better than the NBBO on arrival. Last week, IntelligentCross ATS had a daily average of over 6.2 billion shares of marketable displayed order flow resting at least 10ms on IQX – which means that subscribers might have had opportunities to cross even more. That’s a lot of patient, performant liquidity.

• 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, and ACTIV.