The high-frequency trading firm Virtu Financial, which had expected to go public this month, has decided to postpone those plans indefinitely, a person briefed on the matter said on Thursday.
The decision stemmed from the recent storm of negative attention on the high-frequency trading industry and the stock market performance of companies similar to Virtu, said the person, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. Earlier this month, Virtu moved to postpone its initial public offering by at least a week.
The business of high-frequency trading, which uses computer algorithms to buy and sell shares in milliseconds, has been at the center of a raging debate on Wall Street ever since the publication in late March of “Flash Boys,” a new book by Michael Lewis that claims the stock market is rigged in favor of these lightning-fast traders.
In conversations before the planned I.P.O., prospective investors advised Virtu to wait to let the storm pass before tapping the public markets, the person briefed on the matter said. With the latest decision, the timing of a potential I.P.O. is not known.
A major factor in the decision was the recent market performance of companies that are in related businesses. Shares of KCG Holdings, another trading company, are down about 13 percent since the Friday before the book was released. Shares in one exchange, the CME Group, are down 6 percent, and in another exchange, the Nasdaq OMX Group, are down 5 percent.
In addition, the trading performance of recent initial public offerings has been choppy. A number of companies going public in the last couple of weeks have priced their offerings conservatively in anticipation of an uncertain market.
Virtu turned heads on Wall Street when it first filed for an initial public offering. The company said that it had lost money on just one day in nearly five years, a statistic that was seized on by critics of the industry.
Its decision to delay its offering was reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal online.