Thank you for joining today's webcast titled Unlock the Potential of US Equity Trading During Asia Hours. Before we get started, I'd like to mention that today's session is being recorded and you're currently in a listen-only mode. The ON24 room line today allows you to individually adjust and resize all available panels that appear on your screen. To resize any of the panes, simply click on the lower right-hand corner of that pane and drag it to adjust. You can also move those panes to your preference by clicking anywhere in the top title bar and dragging it to your desired location within the console. We'll be taking your questions at the end of today's event, but you may submit a question or comment at any time using the Q&A panel located on the left-hand side of your screen.
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Thank you, Karen. Hello, welcome to today's webinar on trading the U.S. equity market during Asia daytime hours. My name is Leon Liang. I'll be the moderator today. I'm from the ICE based out of Hong Kong, and I head up the market data feeds business development in APAC. Today, I'm very excited, joined by two industry experts from Blue Ocean ATS and Blue Ocean Technologies, Robb Baiad and John Willock. Welcome both.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Rob and John bring years of experience in the financial service industry and are well-respected for their knowledge and experience. I'm sure they will bring valuable insights to today's topic, which is quite relevant for the audience in the region. Before kicking off this webinar, I would like to invite Rob and John to introduce themselves and their companies. Rob, maybe start from you, please.
Yep, great. First of all, thank you, Leon, and to the audience. I appreciate everyone that's come to listen to this. My name is Robb Baiad. I sit in Blue Ocean ATS, or we like to call it Blue Ocean ATS (BOATS), which is the broker-dealer arm of Blue Ocean. I run sales and trading for APAC.
I'm John Willock.
Thank you, Rob.
Sorry, I was going to say, I'm John Willock. I work for the Blue Ocean Technologies side of the business, which is the parents of Blue Ocean ATS (BOATS), takes care of things like market data, amongst other things. I'm the head of strategy, with a big focus within that role on our market data business.
Great. Thank you. Thank you both, and welcome. A reminder to the audience, we will have a 10 minutes Q&A session towards the end of this webinar. You can send your question through the question Q&A chat box, which I believe located at the right bottom of your screen. You can send a question anytime during the webinar. You don't need to wait to the end and send it. We will try to answer as many question as possible in the Q&A session. You can find documents from ICE and Blue Ocean ATS related to this webinar on this platform. As Karen mentioned, there will be a short survey after this webinar when you log off the portal. I would really appreciate your support. Maybe spending 20 seconds, just give us feedback.
It definitely help us to do this type of event better in the future. To set a theme of today's webinar, trading U.S. market in APAC daytime hour, it's definitely a hot topic in Asia right now. What's the implication of it, and how does Blue Ocean ATS and ICE help customer in the region benefit from this liquidity venue? I'm sure our esteemed speakers today will share valuable insight and their knowledge with the audience. Really looking forward to hearing from them. Without further ado, let's kickstart the webinar today. I would like to actually step back a little bit, just touch on the basic, 'cause this question is asked by many of our customer during initial conversation, which is: What is ATS, and what's so special about Blue Ocean ATS?
Rob, maybe you wanna kickstart this question?
Sure. ATS is just an alternative trading system. There's 33 of them. In the U.S., Blue Ocean is one of 33. It's a non-exchange trading venue, so just matching buyers and sellers. It's typically what people would consider a dark pool because there's no vision into the liquidity, but Blue Ocean ATS would be considered like a lit pool because there's actually vision into the liquidity. What makes it special is, as I said, we're one of 33, but of the 33, we're the only one that has the authorization from the SEC to operate during the hours that we do. Those hours would be, if you're looking at Eastern Standard Time, New York hours, it would be Sunday to Thursday, 8:00 P.M. to 4:00 A.M.
If you wanna look at that Hong Kong time, that would be Monday to Friday, 8:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M.
When you say 32, you mean the 32 ATS that's available out there?
Yeah, there's actually 33 ATSs.
Including Blue Ocean folks, yes.
Which is the license that you get. Yes. Of the 33, we're the only one that has the authorization from the SEC, 'cause we're a registered broker-dealer, so we fall under FINRA and SEC for governance.
Right. Okay. Anything that you wanna, you wanna add in, John, here?
Yeah. I think it's been a fascinating journey, myself having joined earlier this year to really dig into the value proposition that we have at Blue Ocean. I think, chief amongst those things is the realization that actually this creates a 24 by 5 continuous market for U.S. equities. I just wanna highlight that point, 'cause I think that's something that might get lost in the mix when one considers our trading hours. When you zoom out and you look at the bigger picture, that's a really important milestone for sort of the broadening of overall equity trading for the U.S. equity space. We'll see how that affects other markets as time goes on.
What's fascinating within that particularly is that Blue Ocean is the first market to actually open that covers other... of those 33 markets that Rob was mentioning, that covers Reg NMS securities trading in the U.S. when we open 8:00 P.M. Eastern Time on Sunday. If you consider that there could be news events over the course of a weekend which are of significance for any U.S. tradable instrument, we're the first venue at that hour on Sunday night, New York time, to be able to trade and effectively reflect that in market price.
It's been something where we've seen actually a lot of volume to come through on the early hour or couple of hours, on Sunday as people price in and take advantage of that opportunity to trade, ahead of the next markets, which would typically open then Monday at 4:00 in the morning, Eastern Standard Time.
Got it. Maybe you guys wanna touch on, you know, the stocks Blue Ocean, you know, can trade through Blue Ocean, or you wanna just give a bit of a, you know, the audience some insights? What kind of stocks can be traded?
Well, there's-
Over Blue Ocean ATS (BOATS)?
Since we're a registered broker-dealer, any NMS-listed stock is capable of trading on our platform. Currently we have over 1,000 names of the most popular ones that you would think of. you know, the S&P 500, the Nasdaq-100. You have the Tesla, Amazon, Microsoft, Alibaba , the large ETF size QQQ, TQQQ, SQQQ , a lot of the leveraged ones, the natural gas one from Direxion BOIL. we've also kind of focused on customer demand as well. We started with the most popular names that you'll see two-way liquidity in it during our operating hours. If we see demand from the customer side, then we can always go to our liquidity providers and add those on there, as long as they're listed NMS.
Great. Great. Okay. I think, it's very important, like, we understand the basic, like what's ATS and, you know, how Blue Ocean provide that differentiators here. I guess the second question got asked a lot is, who are the target customers in APAC? What can they benefit from trading at Blue Ocean ATS in the APAC hour? Maybe Rob, do you wanna touch on that one?
Yeah. I will. I'm kinda gonna segue into John, because originally, you know, you look at, you look at it for Asia, where the whole time that during the Asia daytime, Blue Ocean is open. Previous to Blue Ocean, if someone wanted to trade a U.S. stock, they would have to put a limit order in, and then they'd have to wait for the U.S. to open for them to find out if they got that fill. Obviously.
Right
for the retail investor, the number 1 thing is just the priority to be able the comfort to know that you've been filled, that you've executed that trade. We've even noticed that, you know, risk travels around the world, there's still people that wanna manage that risk. They're gonna be able to do that by being able to get that execution price, 'cause news is 24 hours, you should be able to trade on that news.
Do you want to touch on, like, who will be the target customer? Are we talking about online broker? Are we talking about buy side? Are we talking about banks? You mentioned risk control.
Well, I mean, I think that it fits everyone. As I said, for the retail broker, they'll be able to know during their daytime if they wanted to buy Tesla or Apple or Amazon while they're awake and know that they executed that trade rather than having to wake up in the middle of the night, keep hitting refresh on their computer to see if they got it filled. More on the institutional side, it would be more about managing the risk that they have.
Got it. Anything you wanna touch on, John?
Yeah. I think it's important to add, just to add to Rob's points that we're interested like anybody else who's operating a trading venue in diverse and I guess differentiated order flow. Retail is always of interest. I think serving that audience is critically important. It's certainly the most visible part. We've had a lot of published success in the recent couple of months around online retail brokers in the region who have come online, and that's very exciting. I think it's also important to highlight there's a lot of buy side conversations taking place.
A lot of, as Rob was putting it, ability to offload risk, especially if you consider, large or block trades that somebody can't take care of in a normal market session, they have that ability to carry that through towards our market sessions as well and break those up and exit positions or enter them for that matter. It is, it is a combination of retail, institutional in the terms of traditional buy side as well as high frequency. We see that with shops as well who are looking at the market structure opportunity we provide where, as I mentioned earlier, being the first venue available on a Sunday night is very interesting and very useful for a lot of reasons we can get into.
There are also interesting facts to do with U.S. ADRs or ETFs, for example, which may have market content that could be, let's just say something like a Japanese-focused ETF listed under U.S. markets. You can now trade that ETF during Japanese trading hours along with the core market in Japan, for example, or any other major Asian market where we overlap with those trading hours. That either from an arbitrage perspective or just generally the ability to manage risk in both marketplaces depending on what your thesis is really fascinating. Single stock names as well, inter-listed companies between a number of global exchange venues that overlap with our trading hours.
Quite a few things in that respect, which begin to be possible and which have been attractive to some of the market participants we've been talking to.
You mentioned buy side market. Would they have concern over the liquidity and the spread that Blue Ocean is provide here? I mean, put another way, is Blue Ocean actually providing them, you know, sufficient liquidity and spread so they can either doing hedging or, you know, running their algo training over this liquidity venue?
Well, I think it really depends on the name, right? Some of the highly, you know, heavily traded ones like QQQ and TQQQs and stuff, they're only 1¢ wide , and even something like Tesla is a 2¢ wide . You know, liquidity begets liquidity. The more market participants that come on, the more liquidity you're gonna see on there, which is naturally going to tighten spreads. I mean, we're now in the first year of operation. We are doing sometimes up to $200 million (notional) per day . You know, 10 million shares per day . We don't really see it. We've been focusing more in the beginning on retail side, where it's a lot of smaller trades, but we've started to work with institutional desks, and we've done some block trades. The short answer is, liquidity is there.
It's obviously gonna be a little wider during the non-core-
Right
... hours, but it's still been, you know, tight considering.
Got it.
Just if I can, to add a couple of-
Sure
I think interesting data points. Rob was mentioning 10 million shares. That actually was our average daily volume for March. We are something like 21 million shares is an all-time high for a single night volume. About 2,200 unique symbols over the course of the last 30 days have traded, so a wide variety of instruments have had executions. To Rob's point, we've got great market maker support. A lot of those have very tight spreads comparable to daytime and market availability. I would say for most, for most traders, the experience would reflect closely what they'd expect to find in any major ATS-type venue or e-exchange-type venue as far as quote availability.
Something in the range of 50-plus thousand executions a night on the ATS typically taking place. Pretty decent numbers I would say, and especially growth over the last couple of months as we've had some of the clients that we've been working through the pipeline come through and start delivering a pretty significant amount of business.
Got it. Is it fair to say that not just the online broker or retail broker market you are targeting along, but you're also expanding the business covering institution side and the buy side trading in the region?
Yeah, that's correct. That's correct. We figured it's a lot easier to start with the retail side to really build up that liquidity, rather than just start with just trying to get those big chunky, you know, block trades. The strategy's been working. As I said, you know, we see a lot of action, and we're starting to see as we focus pivoting a little bit more towards the institutional side now, we're starting to see more of those larger block trades coming in.
Okay. Great. I think, maybe we touch a little bit on the technical details. Maybe tell me a little bit more about how the customer actually connects to the market and trades? Is there any way that the broker here or the institution here connects to Blue Ocean to trade market and get market data here? Maybe John.
Okay.
Rob. Yes.
John, you could go through that.
Sure. Happy to do it. We obviously are available on ICE, which is part of the reason that we're having this seminar today, and a fantastic relationship there. I have to thank you again, Leon, and everyone on this call hosting this, for your help in connecting us with those clients. Essentially, the market data is available through through ICE, and also from, for example, our direct original source in NY4, for anyone who knows where that is as far as Equinix data centers. From a market data perspective, it's a very common format FIX feed that we have as our original source. Once market data is made available to a client, there's also the requirement to connect through a broker-dealer who is able to be our direct interface.
typically this would mean a FINRA-registered broker-dealer who can be our direct client as far as order entry, and they offer services in the domestic markets that they serve, especially, let's just say, Asian clients, a number of firms are making available trading through to Blue Ocean from those jurisdictions. Rob, you may have a few more comments on that topic.
Yeah. just to kinda add on to what John was saying is that because Blue Ocean ATS is a registered broker-dealer, we have to face another broker-dealer to clear and settle the trades. Because you have to remember, it clears and settles exactly as it does during the U.S. day. It's not a derivative.
Right.
The Apple that you trade during the U.S. day is the same Apple that you trade on the Blue Ocean session. Because of that, we realize that a lot of regional banks or, you know. There's a whole bunch of reasons, you know. An Asian bank can have a U.S. desk, but they don't have someone up at night or isn't properly licensed. For that, we have what we like to call our sponsored brokers, and these brokers are fully connected into Blue Ocean, and they would be the ones that would face Blue Ocean ATS for the clearing and the settling part of things. If you take, for example, a regional bank in Hong Kong that doesn't have a U.S. entity but still wants to have access to our liquidity, they would come in through one of the sponsored brokers.
The sponsored brokers right now are Cowen, Vision Financial, ViewTrade, CastleOak Securities, and there's a lot more in the queue to do that. For example, if a bank in Hong Kong wanted to connect and they didn't do it, they could come in through one of the sponsored brokers. The end customer would be able to see the liquidity, the live liquidity, would be able to execute it. That trade would go from the end customer to their, through their OMS, to the sponsored broker, to Blue Ocean ATS and then back.
Right.
The sponsored broker and ATS Blue Ocean would face each other for the clearing and the settling. It gives the advantage to every single bank out there that really wants to add this benefit to their customers.
Connect to the sponsored brokers, the customer can use the, maybe the standard, you know, the proper like FIX to, you know, transmit the order through their OMS to the sponsored brokers' OMS.
Right
Then transmit it to Blue Ocean. Okay.
They would just do a simple FIX connect in, and then they would just tag it to the direction of the Blue Ocean ATS.
Yeah. You mentioned, the customer trade Apple would be the same Apple trade on the stock exchange. Like, how does that work? Like when they trade, say, on Blue Ocean ATS (BOATS) during the daytime, the Asia daytime hour, what happen to that trade and how that reflecting back to the exchange?
John, do you wanna go through the clearing and the settling of that trade?
Sure, I'm happy to. Essentially, as we've been discussing, because we are a full-fledged ATS venue, there is no difference trading anything on this venue as there would be with anything else open any other time of day. The clearing and settlement ultimately cascades through the same series of stages. The clearing broker for any particular trader that takes a position and trades on Blue Ocean will have that reported ultimately through to the National Securities Clearing Corp, which is part of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation. Those are the same.
Right
... shares in every form that you would imagine would be represented by any other, exchange or ATS venue trading, daytime hours or pre or post-market sessions as well. It's just a question of completing trades on this venue, having those then report through, the applicable channels, right to that full clearing system.
All right. Okay. Another question I heard, like this apply to ICE as well, is how the market data reflect the corporate actions change. Like, maybe John or Rob can shed some light over that.
Sure. Rob, would you like me to take that one?
Yeah, that's fine.
Great. We are very careful about how we handle corporate actions. As you can appreciate, a lot of the U.S. market structure is not set up necessarily to deal with corporate action changes taking place during the market hours that were available, because traditionally those were not trading hours.
For example, a post-session implementation, and especially particularly with any kind of short notice of things like a stock split, can cause potential issues where if we're the first session to make some kind of trading available in an instrument which is just undergoing, let's say a two-for-one or a one-for-two split or consolidation, what we will typically do is for those types of situations, for those instruments, we will halt trading in that instrument on the night that it is being implemented.
We will allow that to trade in the other market venues through their day session, and then the next evening, for the start of the following session for us is after that market price, has been established by those other venues and that has normalized essentially through the market and that cascade of that corporate action has taken place. We reopen that for trading and have, an orderly market for those instruments.
Got it.
once all of those things have happened. It's at this point, the prudent thing to do. It ensures that all the connecting brokers who are on the platform are also very clear on the status of the price, the number of units of each share that they are supposed to have, et cetera. All that data has worked its way through to where it needs to be.
Got it. Thank you. I mean, since you guys mentioned ICE-
Just to touch on that, a little bit that,
Sure. Sure.
We give out a report, you know, 30 minutes before the open just to let everyone know what names are halted to the broker.
Yes. Exactly.
Right. Got it. Just since you touched on ICE being one of the major data vendor distributing the Blue Ocean data, I just wanna share with the audience here, we deliver Blue Ocean market data feeds via ICE Consolidated Feed, which is our low latency streaming market data feed product. So customer can subscribe to this feed through connecting to ICE local data center, which is quite available across all the major financial hubs globally. In this region, in APAC, we have Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei, and Sydney. Streaming data can be connected locally into your premises. Or if you're over the cloud, the data is also available in the public cloud environment in APAC and globally.
We also, apart from the Blue Ocean data, the ICE Consolidated Feed actually aggregate content from 600 plus source globally, and it cross different asset classes, including the equity, derivative, fixed income, FX, ETF and crypto. This product is widely used by our, you know, tier 1 banks, asset managers, hedge funds, and redistributor globally, worldwide as well. We're very glad to collaborate with Blue Ocean ATS and Blue Ocean Technology to offer this new data content to the customer in the region. Before we jump into more questions, just quick reminder to the audience here, if you have any questions so far, please key in in the Q&A section, we will answer those question in the Q&A section after the discussion.
Well, thank you both sharing the... with the audience so far. I think it's very insightful. I can see the ATS, Blue Ocean ATS, short for Blue Ocean ATS (BOATS). That's B-O-A-T-S, right? this is quite exciting trading venue for the market participants in the region. Do you see the around the clock of U.S. trading become a trend here in Asia? if yes, do you see where it started and how it spread out in the market? How does Blue Ocean driving this trend right now? Maybe, Rob, do you wanna-
I mean, news is 24 hours a day. We saw what's going on that happened during COVID with everyone trading the crypto. They're used to trading that 24/7. I could give a real example of this week about the advantage of being able to have access to the markets 24. Monday, there was a stock in the U.S. The name of the company is Gamida. The ticker is GMDA. They are a biotech company. After the market closed on Monday in the U.S., the FDA announced approval for their stem cell therapy for blood cancer. The people that didn't have access to Blue Ocean were gonna have to wait till Tuesday.
On Blue Ocean platform, and I just wanna consult the numbers, so I get them right though. It closed in the U.S. and New York at $1.12. In Asia, Blue Ocean opened at $1.24. It hit a high of $1.40 and a low of $1.21, and it closed at $1.31. We saw.
Right
... over 2 million shares single counted, with the notional over $2 million. It didn't open in the U.S. on Tuesday until, you know, the U.S. opened, it was at $1.61. You had that $0.30 of ARB, of real price to be able to have access to, with Blue Ocean.
Yeah. Yeah, that's great. really you can see, you know, that nearer spread actually created really good liquidity in the market. John, any comments on that?
No, I think Rob covered it well. I just want to clarify one thing though, as I'm looking through some of the comments we've received. Blue Ocean as a lit venue means that we're an order book-driven marketplace. We have standard market depth information available. And that's exactly what we're distributing through ICE as far as the availability of real-time information. Just to clarify that point. We appear to any user who's using us as a trading venue to reflect similarly to any other major exchange or ATS that they're typically using, where you'll go and do your online order entry and you'll see either best bid and offer or fuller depth of book, depending on the quotes provided to be able to enter that order.
In that sense, we replicate exactly the user experience anyone should expect to have during any other trading session.
This is, uh, this is-
I just wanna add one more thing on that too, is we don't pay for order flow, so it's the top of the book is always best bid, best offer.
Right. This is compared with a dark pool, you just referred to, where you don't see the order from the other side, and everything is matched by the broker, right?
Right. Yeah. We're fully transparent pre-trade and post-trade in that respect.
Good. Great. I think, you know, we receive a lot of question. I think we probably take more time to jump into the Q&A section and, you know, to answer the question from the audience. Make sure that we have enough time to cover all the question here. There are lots of question here. I will pick up those question. I try to assign the question to the right speaker, including myself. Let's see who they are. Just one second. One of the questions saying, "Apologies, I'm still new to U.S. ATS. Can you explain the stock settlement again, please? And how shares are settled on the ATS?" I think those are common question when we talk to the customers.
As a client of one of the registered broker, do I just settle the trade with my broker, and my broker will settle with Blue Ocean? Who is the clearing house?" I think this is for Rob, or maybe like John or Rob. Who do you think that is, Rob?
I think John touched on it. John could.
Mr. Owen, sorry.
... reiterate what he said before.
Right. Well, the answer is that this is completely the same as any other U.S. equity trading experience that anyone would have. Undifferentiated completely in that respect. To the extent that somebody is trading any other U.S. equity markets right now, they have their broker through whom they're accomplishing that. The broker is then passing through all that information, cascading through their channels, ultimately to the clearing houses in the U.S., National Securities Clearing Corporation, as we mentioned. Blue Ocean is reporting all of our trades through the FINRA/NYSE TRF, as far as that post-trade transparency. Simultaneously, we're sending that through as well to our clearing partners, such that those become settled just like any other trade. There's no differentiation.
There's nothing that is an asterisk in that respect that's worth mentioning in terms of the settlement process. Beyond the fact that we are trading during these hours, which typically did not have trading and settlement, so we bundle those reports at 4:00 A.M. when that is possible for us to report for the trading session that then begins typically at 4:00 A.M. for all other venues. We're making our reports at that point in time from 8:00 P.M. to 4:00 A.M. at that 4:00 A.M. window when that reporting opportunity opens for us.
That 4:00 A.M., that's the AP hour or the U.S. hour? Sorry.
Sorry. When I made those comments, those are Eastern Standard Time, so 8:00 P.M. Eastern Time to 4:00 A.M., so New York time.
Got it. Okay, thank you. Rob, you wanna further comment on that?
No, I mean, John said it perfectly and it, you know, it's not a derivative or anything. It clears and settles exactly as it does during the U.S. day. There's nothing different about it. Whoever the broker is would face Blue Ocean, and those two would face each other and clear and settle, and then re-report it to the consolidated tape.
Great. Okay. We have another question, very interesting. "Why not offering all the stocks trading outside U.S. trading hour, and what's the consideration?" I think it's a lot of customer also ask us when we introduce Blue Ocean data feed, how many stocks available? Who are they? Any comments, both?
Well, I mean, since we are a registered broker-dealer, we could add any NMS-listed stock to our platform. We started with the large popular ones, then we're going with the view of let the customer decide. If we see demand from a customer, and that is a liquid name, we will talk to one of our liquidity providers and be able to add it on there. Even if they, and I could give you know, real-life examples where, you know, we had one of the customers wanted to trade a Indian ADR, it wasn't on there currently. We went to some of our liquidity providers. They added it the next day, you know, they've been trading it ever since.
Even if they don't see it on there, if we know there's the demand on it, we can add it.
Great. No. There's another one, thanks to Walt Eyes. "What cloud solution were you able to deliver the feeds in?" We provide a product called Cloud Connect, which deliver our real-time market data into various different public cloud providers globally. Doesn't really matter where you are, in what region. If you own most of the public cloud providers out there in these regions of the local cloud providers, we also support. We'll be able to seamlessly deliver the real-time market data, Blue Ocean market data into your cloud environment. There's another one. This is simple one. "Sorry, what's ATS stand for?" I think I can help answer that. That's the Alternative Trading System, right?
That's correct.
Good. Another question over the best execution. "How to ensure the best execution price given it's off trading hour for the U.S. market?" This is interesting one. Any comment on that?
I mean, Our market is best bid, best offer. Whatever the top of the book is what that price is going to be.
Simple. What do you need to set up as a broker-dealer instead of just purely an ATS? I mean, this is more on, you know, what broker dealer can connect. Not really sure that's the-
I think this is.
S and L physical.
Yeah, I think maybe this is more a question of nomenclature and nuance in that respect. If you step back and you look at the overall market picture, you have a combination of exchanges and ATSs. Exchanges would be NYSE or Nasdaq, for example. They have the ability to list an instrument, and make it available as an IPO, and then ultimately primary trading there. Then ATSs are what.
Yeah
are called secondary trading venues. another location, hence the alternative name, where you can make available organized quoting and trading for those same stocks. All of those stocks, those U.S.-listed stocks, are what falls under our Regulation National Market System or Reg NMS for short. Underneath that, if you're not an exchange and you're an ATS, technically speaking, you are a broker-dealer who is offering within your services that alternative trading system as one of your services to your clients. At a high level, we're an ATS. That's the essential thing to take note from here. Technically speaking, to be an ATS, you actually are a broker-dealer yourself. Hence, we also have to face off then as far as directly...
connecting participants to other equally registered broker-dealers, under FINRA and U.S. law.
I think that's very clear. Thank you, John. I think this is worth mentioning again. There's another question regarding Blue Ocean as a liquidity pool. This means our retail clients would get a live price feed when trading on your platform? I think that's definitely.
I'm sorry. Can you repeat that?
Yes, it's another platform.
Can you repeat the question?
Blue Ocean is a liquidity pool, so that means our retail customer would get a live price feed when they're trading on your platform. Yes, no?
Correct. Yes.
Yeah, they see the full Level 2 book.
Exactly. We have great market maker coverage for a huge variety of instruments, so there should be excellent liquidity visible through any market data feed that somebody would pull up when trading with us.
All right. I think this is another interesting question everyone probably wants to know is I wonder pricing, at the pricing side, how the specific stock price is reflected during the Asia hour. Without the market opening, how the price is reflected. I think first, you know, how the market opening in Blue Ocean works, right? How does the price reflect. That relate back to the liquidity, the transparency. I think it's worth to.
Right. for the reference.
Maybe just emphasize that. Yeah.
Yep. Sorry. For the reference price, we take from 30 minutes before Blue Ocean opens for what it was last traded. Once it starts trading, that becomes the new reference price.
From the reference price, you mean from exchange-traded price?
Right.
Do you.
After hours trading, we'll look at what it last traded at 30 minutes before Blue Ocean opens, and we'll set that as the reference price. Once the market opens and it starts trading, then that naturally becomes the new reference price. Whatever the last trade was.
Got it. another one. I think this one is the same as asking the settlement process. well, maybe worth mentioning again, which U.S. Clara and brokers are able to support both at the moment. I think, Rob, you mentioned before, maybe just try to emphasize and repeat it. Do you have documents to share later on? maybe just let the audience know as well.
Sure. What we call, as I said, the sponsored brokers are TD Cowen, Vision Financial, ViewTrade, CastleOak Securities, and we have more in the process connecting right now that should be going live. Some of the larger brokers realize the opportunity there. We're constantly getting new brokers to connect and test. That's just going to give a lot more availability, a lot more options to the regional brokers that are looking at their primes and such as how to have access to the liquidity.
Got it. How does Boat plan to engage with other countries in the A-APEC region? I think this is a very interesting question, also related to your roadmap. By the way, ICE is, you know, we A-APEC fully covered, so we can support Boat's feeds, basically everywhere in the A-APEC region. To you, Rob.
Well, you know, this is an APEC-focused webinar, we kind of just kept the point on APEC, but it's a very good question. You know, as John had mentioned earlier, risk does travel around the world, and people are gonna wanna manage that risk. Maybe they don't get the opportunity of all 8 hours as they do in Asia. In our queue, to connect, we have firms in the Middle East, we have firms in Australia and New Zealand, as well as Eastern Europe and Europe. You know, we're systematically going around to do that. I'm going to be in Japan with ICE co-marketing the data and the platform starting on Monday. If anyone actually. We have a pretty full schedule
It's exciting, but we could always find time for more. If anyone on this webinar is actually based in Japan and wants to have a more in-depth chat, then please just reach out after, and we could discuss it. John.
Yeah.
Do you wanna kind of go into more of the strategy on that?
Well, not to take too much time on this topic, but I think it is, it's very important for us to continue to increase our visibility as far as access to the information. Again, hence, what we're doing with respect to ICE in terms of distribution. We are working through discussions with online media, so things like your Yahoo Finance or other websites displaying stock quote information and making available just the knowledge that BOATS is available for trading during the hours that we have. As far as what Rob was talking about earlier, to an extent it's an organic process where we have a lot of inbound inquiries from all kinds of categories of firms all over the world, all the way from retail, again, up to institutional sophisticated.
We're essentially pursuing a lot of parallel conversations. I would say watch this space over the next 8 weeks in particular that we can foresee for some very exciting announcements about additional clients that I think everyone would expect that will be great for our market development, our growth, the amount of volume we expect to see, and sort of our increasing integration as a interesting and critical part of overall U.S. equity trade flows. Again, the only one during the hours that we have available so that there is now a continuous 24-hour effective market for 5 days a week.
Thank you. Thanks for the comment. I just put on the contact information for the audience. Feel free to contact John, Rob, and myself for any question related to our trading Blue Ocean and market data for this liquidity venue. I think there's lots of question regarding the broker, the agency broker, sponsor broker. One of the question is, "If my broker is currently not connected to Blue Ocean ATS, how can I facilitate? Is there a list of broker currently subscribed?" Again, I mean, we keep emphasizing that apparently this is the one of the key question our customers want to know how to connect, right? Rob, do we have any document or list of broker we can share with the audience?
Yeah. I mean, I think it depends on the, you know, the region. You know, if they're in Korea, I think we pretty much have every single broker that is trading. You know, Futu in Hong Kong's just been going live. We have more firms coming on. CIMB in Singapore is live. We have, as I said, we have a large European bulge bracket that's in the final testing stages that's going to do that. I think for the customer, I think the best way to do it is to reach out to your broker dealer and ask them if they are connected to Blue Ocean, because that's usually the best way to get them to move up the queue like that, is getting the actual demand from the end customer.
Anyone can reach out directly to me, and if they tell me what, you know, region they're in, I could tell them exactly and who those brokers that are currently trading on our platform.
I think that's that would be the simplest way, just send an email to you on this email address shown on the screen. Great. Why do you think Korea market was able to be the first mover of U.S. trading in Asia time? The needs from retail or the regulation is not strict compared with other countries like Singapore, Japan, and Hong Kong. I think there's two question here, why it is the first mover and any change, any difference on the regulatory perspective.
No, I think it was almost like the chicken or the egg, where when we went out to go to most-
Right
... of the brokers, it was like, "Well, who else is connected?" You know, "Why don't you call me back when other people do it?" We've seen an absolute first mover advantage. Samsung was the first broker to connect to the platform. I think they did about $1 billion notional in around 3 months. They picked up in a hyper-competitive market, around 4% of that, of that market. That kinda led it, and then once they went in, it kinda went into hyperdrive that way. For those people that are listening that are on the fence about it, you know, they wanna do it, there's absolute proof of the first mover advantage.
You know, the customers that come there, if you're waiting and you're on the sidelines and you lose those customers, then you finally do get connected, they're probably not going to come back to that. Our queue is getting deeper and deeper. It's gonna be harder to come in. You know, as I said, my suggestion would be to try to connect, as quickly as possible.
Yeah. I think we're definitely creating a trend, and we see Korea move first and the other places like Hong Kong and Japan, you know, we see a lot of brokers and institution also, you know, connecting to the venue. Definitely great news for this the new content, data content. Sorry, maybe we still have time for maybe two more. Are there any circuit breaker type of mechanism implemented? This is very interesting. I assume this is talking about, like, during the US trading hour, if the movement of the price is significant, there will be a circuit breaker. Are there any circuit breaker implement in Blue Ocean currently?
I can jump in on this one and share a couple of comments. Robb earlier made reference to checking the 7:30 P.M. price, Eastern Time, ahead of our 8:00 P.M. Eastern Time close, sorry, market open. That essentially is the first reference point that we would have when we look at the market orders that we will allow into the trading venue. We do have what we would call price bands where we do a check, a sanity check essentially for a particular distance from that reference price for the first trades, but also subsequently, on an ongoing basis during our trading hours for orders that may significantly differ from the most recent price that we're tracking.
Essentially what that really means is you shouldn't be able to fat finger or cause a trade which is incredibly large deviation away from the price that we are tracking, and that provides for some degree of control against either accidental or otherwise, you know, substantial volatility in price. It's, it's not a circuit breaker as such, but it is a way for us to essentially have a risk filter in that respect. We'd recommend that anybody who's looking to place orders also consult with their broker partner who will be actually the connected party to us would allow for as far as their pass-through and their risk controls and checks.
Thank you.
Just to add on what John said is that when he's talking about that is there's a 15% band that we have on either way of the reference price, and any order that comes in that's outside that band would get rejected.
I see. Okay. I think we have time for last question? Will Blue Ocean look into introducing derivative instruments in the future? Very interesting. Rob, you wanna comment on that?
I can or John, I know that that's one of your sweet spots you like to talk about. Do you want me to?
Sure.
Pass it over to you?
I can't make any comments at this point about things like derivatives instruments. I would say our other strategic interests, aside from growing what we have and becoming really good at providing the services, would be expanding our trading hours. Progressively, not just being the particular hour set where we're the exclusive venue of the ATS markets available, but also into what's known as the pre and the post market. Essentially 4:00 A.M. to market open. Again, times are quoted here as Eastern. From the post session, going towards that 8:00 P.M. timeframe will be open. And quite frankly, at some point in the undefined future, if we can, moving towards a fully 24-hour cycle for availability of the Blue Ocean trading session.
That would be an ultimate goal, and that's all related to equities and ETFs and things that again fall within that Reg NMS instrument set. At this point I don't have any comment with respect to derivatives or things of that nature.
Okay.
Just to add on that, though, the end customers that are trading CFDs are showing the Blue Ocean price on there for the swaps, if that's what they're alluding to on derivative products.
All right. Okay. Good. I think, I think it's time to wrap up. Just a reminder to the audience here, please help conduct a short survey when you log off the portal. Probably just take you 20 to 30 seconds to fill, but your feedback is very important to us. I would like to thank you very much for our wonderful speakers, Rob and John, for sharing your insights and experience with us today on trading the U.S. equity market during Asia daytime hours. Your knowledge and experience have been incredible valuable. We appreciate your time and effort dedicated to this webinar. Thank you both.
Leon, I wanna thank you for organizing this, inviting and, you know, we're excited to, you know, to work together closely, you know, with ICE going forward. To thank the audience-
Thank you, Rob.
For listening to us.
Appreciate it. I also want to thank our attendees for joining us today and participating in this session. We hope you found the webinar informative and engaging, and you'll be able to take away some actionable insights to apply to your own trading strategy. Please know that a recording of this webinar will be available later on the ICE and Blue Ocean ATS webpage. We encourage you to share this recording with your colleagues or friends who may not, you know, attend this event to understand, you know, what's Blue Ocean and how Blue Ocean and ICE can help you in, you know, trading this new liquidity venue. Once again, thank you to all the speakers and attendees for making this webinar a success.
We look forward to seeing you at our future events. Thank you.