Defying Gravity: IEX’s Quote Presence Climbs

How we’re bucking the trend of declining displayed liquidity

If you haven’t updated your routing tables recently, now might be a good time to take another look at IEX’s position in the market. Over the last six months, dramatic shifts in displayed liquidity have emerged, and IEX’s quoting presence has grown significantly.

As we discussed in our September chart of the month, IEX’s quote presence surged following new displayed trading enhancements, including an increased rebate for displayed adding of up to 20 mils per share. This month, we’re revisiting that quoting presence metric—% of Time on Both sides of the NBBO in Russell 3000 (R3K) names—looking at it as a time series to see how it has evolved as firms have had time to react to IEX’s displayed growth.

We can see that IEX’s % Time on Both Sides of the NBBO in R3K names has continued to grow, even as other non-primary listing maker-taker exchanges have seen their quote presence steadily decline. Across the market, displayed liquidity appears to have dropped compared to a year ago, but IEX appears to be bucking that trend, doubling its quote presence.

12 months ago, IEX lagged behind the five largest non-primary listing exchanges in quote presence for R3K names. Today, IEX has significantly more quote presence than all five, with nearly double of even ARCA, the largest of that group.

This means that IEX increasingly has displayed liquidity when other exchanges do not. Plus, IEX charges a materially lower fee to remove displayed liquidity than any of these exchanges. A lot can change in six months.

IEX has transformed our displayed book—we think we can be transformative for your displayed liquidity needs, too.