PDQ Enterprises, an alternative trading systems operator, on Monday launched an enhanced model that will pull together interest in buying or selling a stock to allow institutional investors to place larger orders and stymie predatory trading. PDQ's AUCTION1 takes its name from an auction process that will match large orders during a pause that can last up to 1 second, giving what PDQ hopes will be enough time to combine its orders and those from other markets to increase available liquidity.The firm aims to deter high-frequency traders (HFT) by taking longer to execute the trade. PDQ would start with a minimum of 2,500 shares to initiate the auction, responding orders would have to be at least 500 shares, and PDQ would report the finished auction as a single trade in order to keep high-frequency traders away, the firm said."A lot of larger players will find comfort in that single print, because a multilateral trade is very hard to reverse engineer or deconstruct," said Keith Ross, chief executive officer of Chicago-based PDQ Enterprises."I'm pretty comfortable this is the first time we will be able to pull liquidity to the order, instead of the other way around," said Ross, a former CEO of GETCO, a HFT firm that took over Knight Capital Group last year to form KCG Holdings Inc .
KCG Holdings, Inc., is an independent securities firm. Shares of KCG fell by 0.76% or $-0.0801/share to $10.40. In the past year, the shares have traded as low as $8.25 and as high as $12.61. On average, 493319 shares of KCG exchange hands on a given day and today's volume is recorded at 93475.
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