I'd say IEX has done remarkably well - it's not likely to displace NASDAQ or NYSE but it has solidified its place as the #3 US exchange by any reasonable measure. If TXSE achieves comparable market share I'd call that a wild success.

You're not wrong to say that most participants don't care about what IEX offers, but enough do to make a meaningful dent in trading volume.

It’s definitely not 3rd place. That’s cboe and it’s not close. It’s hanging around with ~2% of the trade volume.

https://www.cboe.com/us/equities/market_statistics/

I don’t know if that is “remarkably well” but it certainly isn’t some market paradigm shift.

If you were to tell me in 10 years the Texas exchange would have 2% of the market I’d believe you. But I’d still not be terribly impressed.

IEX is "3rd place" in their mind only because the other 12 exchanges are owned by two companies. IEX is 13/13 for volume, and the main reason they have any volume is because IEX sometimes has the NBBO so you have to trade there per reg NMS.

You're right, my view is way out of date. I didn't realize CBOE had grown so much in straight equities trading. IEX is the best of the rest, but it's NYSE, NASDAQ and (to my surprise) CBOE as the clear top 3.

> #3 US exchange by any reasonable measure

According to their stats, they are usually around 3% of the market:

https://iextrading.com/stats/

Cboe miax and memx are all doing better than IEX

That’s what always surprises me when folks bring this up. Nobody in the market cares. Institutional investor experience some of the lowest trading cost in history. These complaints are most often coming from retail traders where again I don’t follow the argument. Instead of some guy on the floor picking up dollars with have machines picking up pennies. This is a win for everyone.

Nobody in the market cares because everyone in the market are cheaters. There is a huge untapped potential of people outside the current market that do not participate because they know the market is rigged against them.

A fair market could be huge, but the trick is keeping it fair. It used to be more fair, and we used to have a healthier economy because of it.

It’s not like most of the unfairness in the current market couldn’t be dealt with, probably with laws already on the books. Most HFT strategies are not only blatantly dishonest but also clearly illegal. The government looks the other way though, because corruption.

> Most HFT strategies are not only blatantly dishonest but also clearly illegal.

What specific strategies are you referring to? Genuinely curious.

> > Most HFT strategies are not only blatantly dishonest but also clearly illegal.

> What specific strategies are you referring to? Genuinely curious.

Any strategy that outperforms his 10-20% passive index fund VTI/QQQ ETF.

HFT is pulling 50-100% annual returns for decades.

HFT is capacity constrained, yes. But anyone would take 100% return every year on “only” $100 million on deployed capital.

Where is the citation for this 100% HFT? Lots of numbers floating around but the only time I have seen those types of numbers are for short lived periods.

My issue as always with these numbers is that back in the day you had some bloke on the floor vacuuming up this wide spreads and today we have some of the smallest spreads in history. It has a cost but that cost is generally less than what you were paying before.

Hyperbole, hyperbole, hyperbole. Define more fair. Spreads are some of the lowest they have been in history.