Five years ago, Aequitas brought its vision for the Canadian capital markets forward. Founded by a diverse ownership group of investors, dealers and companies, all focused on the founding vision of making markets better.
The ownership group, with a majority interest represented by investors and public companies, believes in fostering innovation and competition, and believes that more fairness, liquidity, transparency and efficiency in the markets is in the greatest public interest.
Three years ago, it launched the NEO Exchange. In that short time, NEO has accomplished a lot (full recap here), including:
- Captured 10% of all Canadian equity trading; and 20% of all Canadian ETF trading (they also trade upwards of 50% of some of the most popular ETF products)
- Attracted over 60 NEO-listed symbols (44 funds) and a pipeline of public companies
- First Canabis SPAC IPO’ed late last year; first dual listed company (Nobilis Health) began trading in March.
Proven market structure designed fro the long-term investors works
- Reduced intermediation - 80% of volume on NEO is from natural investors
- Reliable liquidity - 60% of all orders rest on NEO for at least 10 seconds
NEO is not done yet. Late last week, NEO filed with the OSC to introduce the NEO dark pool. A dark book was always part of the vision and it will soon be a reality, designed to once again focus on natural investors. It will have NEO's unique matching priorities and simple order types. Only NEO Traders will be able to submit active orders and matching priority will be given to 1) price 2) broker 3) NEO Trader and 4) HFT. Size-time priority will be used to rank orders. Take-take fee structure.
Official OSC notice: http://www.osc.gov.on.ca/en/Marketplaces_xxr-aequitas-neo_20180329_rfc-amendments.htm