What we started with was very simple: a desire to democratize great execution.
We believed US equities traders deserved a venue that helped them trade better and solved for their objectives -- great price discovery with minimal market impact. And, as traders, researchers, and engineers, we knew we could build it.
So, four years ago this month, we set out to level up the world of traditional equities trading and launched the IntelligentCross ATS.
We’re now proud to see our ASPEN book displaying orders better than the NBBO over 10 million times per day on arrival and contributing to price discovery! We’re thrilled to see close to 1 bps lower market impact on our Midpoint book which--scaled against the US equities market--could save investors $10 billion a year. And we love watching traders embrace what we offer – which is why we’re now breaking 1% TCV.
Our passion for democratizing great execution is as high as it was on day one. It’s what keeps us working for it every day.
-Roman
September 2022 has opened with IntelligentCross setting new records for market share--more than double what it was a year ago.
For the past two weeks, we've been listed #3 for trading Tier 1 NMS securities in FINRA's weekly ATS report.
Our displayed order book, ASPEN, is offering groundbreaking price discovery.
Traders turn to us because we've built a marketplace that maximizes price stability and is more efficient for investors. Talk to our desk about what we can do for you.
In the early days, we worked as a team, did it all--including office vacuuming--and got creative with equipment to get the platform off the ground. Years later a lot has changed, but we've never lost our tremendous sense of pride and ownership in what we do. We've also kept our creative spirit, as we build out new features for subscribers.
Moments like this are a celebration of the traders we work with and the bespoke relationships we've built, so that we understand their business and deliver for them. It’s been fun and gratifying to build out two types of order books for customers and to customize our offerings to even better meet their needs. Year five is going to be full of innovations that should draw even more order flow.
Building a completely new trading system from scratch was an unforgettable experience. We were constructing a high-performance platform that wasn’t weighed down by old assumptions or past mistakes. We could focus purely on what traders needed for best execution. Many technical challenges were solved by just a handful of engineers. It was amazing to watch the day it kicked off and started flying in the real world.
The team we’ve built has steadily grown but it still has the same DNA we started with: a shared passion and talent for innovating to solve our clients’ problems. We work hard to very specifically understand and meet their needs. Because we are all focused on the same thing, there’s a very unified, egalitarian vibe around the way the team works together. It’s all about our clients–without their support and continued confidence in our abilities, we would not be anywhere near where we are today.
There was electricity in the air of the 8 x 16 room we started in. We knew we were building something special that was going to change the landscape for traders. We were a very tight-knit, cohesive team that focused every day on meeting our deliverables, and what it would take to get the job done well for our subscribers and early adopters.
I joined IntelligentCross right out of college. This was just after launch and the order flow was growing quickly, but the numbers were tiny compared to where we are now: I remember our excitement the day a client traded a million shares for the first time! Several years in, I seem to enjoy my job so much more than most of my peers, because of the opportunities, mentorship, and shared focus on constantly improving the platform.
Our culture on the operations team combines a hyper-intense focus on daily performance with a laid-back, sometimes slightly goofy sense of humor that keeps us all humming along. This is as true today as it was back when we first launched the ASPEN lit order book– every time we got a fill we’d play a guitar riff! Our huge volume means we don’t do that any more, but we approach every single order that comes in like we did those first ones–giving it our laser focus to ensure we’re delivering on price optimization and minimal market impact.
