Weekly Highlights

• Last week, overall execution conditions remained in line with the week prior: generally benign for algo trading. Somewhat surprisingly, given the news cycle on economic policy, active ETFs were at their lowest market share since the beginning of November. Even more surprising was that technology names did not show any harbinger of the events of Monday, January 27th, given that outlets such as Arstechnica broke the DeepSeek story all the way back on January 21st. In fact, Friday the 24th saw some of the narrowest average spreads since November in the group.

• Of course Monday was quite different. Taking NVDA as our example, post-trade markouts were at their highs for the year market wide, and as quote activity picked up shortening average duration, post-trade quote stability declined. However, spreads remained rather contained all things considered and there was little disruption in where NVDA traded, both in terms of venue selection and price location. This wasn’t the case for the NVDA-linked ETFs; long levered names saw an increase in block and intraspread trading, while the short names concentrated more towards the touch.

• Despite the disruption, subscribers to IntelligentCross were able to benefit from our performant liquidity. Post-trade markouts and quote instability were lower for both ASPEN and Midpoint matches than the exchange averages, out to 500ms, for both NVDA and its collection of linked ETFs.

• If you haven’t explored how our platform can enhance your trading performance, we invite you to connect with us. ASPEN displayed quotes are available via the IQX market data feed, accessible directly or through providers such as Exegy, MayStreet, and Option.