Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. (ICE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you for joining today's webcast to Unlock the Potential of U.S. Equity Trading During Asia Hours. Before we get started, I'd like to mention that today's session is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] Now without further delay, let's begin today's event, Unlock the Potential of U.S. Equity Trading During Asia Hours. I'd like to introduce Leon Liang, Director, Feeds Business Development at ICE Data Services. Leon, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Karen. Hello, and 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 2 industry experts from Blue Ocean ATS and Blue Ocean Technologies, Robb Baiad and John Willock. Welcome both.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And Robb and John brings years of experience in the financial service industry, and are well respected for their knowledge and experience. And 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 Robb and John to introduce themselves and their companies. Robb, maybe start from you, please.

Yes. Great. First of all, thank you, Leon, and to the audience. I appreciate everyone that's come to this. My name is Robb Baiad. I sit in Blue Ocean ATS, or we like to call it BOATS, which is the broker-dealer arm of Blue Ocean. I run sales and trading for APAC.

And I'm John Willock -- Sorry, I was going to say and I'm John Willock. I work for the Blue Ocean Technology side of the business, which is the parent of BOATS, and 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, both, and welcome. [Operator Instructions]. 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 customers 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, so really looking forward to hearing from them. So without further ado, let's kick start the webinar today. I would like to actually step back a little bit, just give -- just touch on the basic, because this question is asked by many of our customers during initial compensation. Which is, what is ATS? And what's so special about Blue Ocean ATS? Robb, maybe you want to kickstart these question?

Sure. So ATS is this, 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 it's 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 a vision into the liquidity. What makes it special is, as I said, we're -- 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 p.m. to 4 a.m. If you want to look at that Hong Kong time, that would be Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.

When you say 32 -- I mean, the 32 ATS that's available out there.

Yes, there's -- there's actually 33 ATSs that are -- which is [indiscernible] yes. And of the 33, we're the only one that has the authorization from the SEC because we're registered broker-dealers, so we fell under FINRA and SEC for governance.

Right. Okay. And you're saying that -- you want to add in, John, here?

Yes. 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. And I think chief amongst those things is the realization that actually this creates a 24/5 continuous market for U.S. equities. I just want to highlight that point because I think that's something that might get -- might get lost in the mix when one considers our trading hours. But 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. But what's fascinating within that particularly is that Blue Ocean is the first market to actually open that covers, of those 33 markets that Robb was mentioning, that covers Reg NMS securities trading in the U.S. when we open 8 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday. So if you consider that there could be news events over the course of a weekend which are of significance for any U.S. tradable instruments, 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. So it's been something where we've seen actually a lot of volume to come through on the early hour or a couple of hours on Sunday as people price in and take advantage of the 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 want to touch on the stocks Blue Ocean's -- can trade to Blue Ocean? Or you want to just give a bit of -- the audience some insights, what kind of stocks can be traded over BOATS?

Since we're registered broker-dealer and the 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. The S&P 500, the NASDAQ 100, so the -- you have the Teslas, the Amazons, the Microsofts, the BABAs, the large ETF size, [ Qs , TQ, SQ ], a lot of the leverage ones, the natural gas [indiscernible], Boyle . So we've also kind of focused on customer demand as well, so we started with the most popular names that you'll see 2-way liquidity in it during our operating hours. But if we see demand from the customer side, then we could 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 how Blue Ocean provide that differentiators here. I guess the second question asked a lot is who are the target customers in APAC? And what can they benefit from trading at Blue Ocean ATS in the APAC hour? Maybe, Robb, do you want to touch on that one?

Yes, I will. And then I'm kind of going to segue into John because originally, you look at it for Asia where the whole time that during the Asian day time, Blue Ocean is open. So 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. So obviously, for the retail investor, the #1 thing is just the priority to be able the comfort to know that you've been filled, that you've executed that trade. But we've even noticed that risk travels around the world and so there are still people that want to manage that risk, and so they're going to be able to do that by being able to get that execution price. Because news is 24 hours, so you should be able to trade on that news.

And 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....

I think that there's -- Yes, I think that it fits everyone. As I said, for the retail broker, they'll be able to now during their daytime if they wanted to -- if they wanted to buy Tesla or Apple or Amazon. Well, there are a way to 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. And more on the institutional side, it would be more about managing the risk that they have.

Got it. Anything you want to touch on, John?

Yes. I think it's important to add, just to add to Robb's points, that we're interested like anybody else who's operating a trading venue in diverse and, I guess, differentiated order flow. So 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. But I think it's also important to highlight a lot of buy-side conversations taking place. A lot of, as Robb was putting it, ability to offload risk, especially if you consider larger 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. So it is a combination of retail, institutional in the terms of traditional buy-side as well as high frequency, and we see that with shops as well. We're 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. But 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 markets where we overlap with those trading hours. And that, either from an arbitrage perspective or just generally the ability to manage risk in both marketplaces, depending on what your thesis is, is really fascinating. Single stock names as well, interlisted companies between a number of global exchange venues that we lap with our trading hours. So 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.

I just want a quick -- you mentioned buy-side market, right. Would they have concern over the liquidity and the spread that Blue Ocean has provided here? I mean, put it another way, that is -- is Blue Ocean actually providing them the sufficient liquidity and spread so they can be doing hedging or running their outlook training over this liquidity venue?

Well, I think it really depends on the name, right? Some of the highly heavily traded ones like [ Qs ] and [ TQs ] and stuff, they're only a cents wide and even something like Tesla is a couple of cents wide. Liquidity begets liquidity. The more market participants that come on, the more liquidity you can see on there, which is naturally going to tightened spreads. But I mean, we're now in the first year of operation. We are doing sometimes up to 200 million notional a day, 10 million shares single counted a day, so we don't really see it. We've been focusing more in the beginning on the retail side where it's a lot of smaller trades, but we've started to work with institutional debt because we've done some block trades. So the short answer is liquidity is there. It's obviously going to be a little wider during the non-core hours, but it's still been tight considering.

So just -- if I can, to add a couple of, I think, interesting data points. So Robb was mentioning 10 million shares. That actually was our average daily volume for March, and 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. And to Robb's point, we've got great market maker support, so a lot of those have a very tight spreads comparable to daytime market availability. And I would say for most traders, the experience would reflect closely what they expect to find in any major ATS type venue or 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. So a pretty decent number, 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 talking alone, but you're also expanding the business covering institution side and in the buy-side trading in the region?

Yes, 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 block trades. But so -- the strategy has been working. As I said, 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 trade. Is there any way that the broker here or the institution here connects to Blue Ocean to trademark and then get market data here? Maybe John, you -- or Robb.

John, you could go through that.

Sure. Happy to do it. So 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 and connecting us with those clients. But essentially, the market data is available through ICE and also from, for example, our direct, original source in NY4, for anyone who knows where that is as far as our next data centers. From a market data perspective, it's a very common format fixed fee that we have as our original source. And 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. So particularly, this would mean a FINRA registered broker-dealer who could 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. Robb, you may have a few more comments on that topic.

Yes. So just to kind of 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. The Apple that you trade during the U.S. day is the same Apple that you trade on the Blue Ocean session. And so because of that, we realized that a lot of regional banks or there's a whole bunch of reasons. An Asian bank could have a U.S. desk, but they don't have someone up at night or is it properly licensed. And for that, we have what we like to call our sponsor 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. So 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 into one of the sponsor brokers. So the sponsor brokers right now are Cowen, Vision Financial, [ View Trade ], Castle Loop Securities, and there's a lot more in the queue to do that. So for example, if a bank in Hong Kong wanted to connect and they didn't do it, they could come into 1 of the sponsor brokers. And so the end customer would be able to see the liquidity, the live liquidity. We'd be able to execute it. That trade would go from the end customer to their OMS, to the sponsor broker, to Blue Ocean ATS and then back. And then the sponsor broker and Blue Ocean would face each other for the clearing and the settling. So it makes -- it gives the advantage to every single bank out there that really wants to add this benefit to their customers.

And connect to the sponsor brokers, the customer can use the -- maybe the standard, the proper, like, fix to transmit the order to their OMS to the sponsor brokers' OMS, and then transmit it to Blue Ocean. Okay.

Yes, they would just do a simple fix, connect in and then they would just tag it to the direction of the Blue Ocean ATS.

Yes. You mentioned the customer trade Apple will be the same Apple trade on the stock exchange. How does that work? When they trade, say, on BOATS during the daytime, the Asian daytime hour, what happened? What happened to the trade and how that reflect in back to the exchange?

John, do you want to go through the clearing and the setting of that trade?

Sure. I'm happy to. So 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, we'll have that reported ultimately through to the National Securities Clearing Corp., which is part of the Depository Trust Clearing Corporation. So those are the same shares in every form that you would imagine that would be represented by any other exchange or ATS venue trading daytime hours or pre or post market sessions as well. So 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.

Right. Okay. And another question I heard, like this applies to ICE as well, is how the market data reflect the corporate actions change? Like would you -- maybe John or Robb can share some light over that?

Sure. Robb, would you like me to take that one?

Yes, that's fine. .

Great. So 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. So 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 the instrument which is just undergoing, let's say, 2 for 1 or 1 for 2 split or consolidation, what we will typically do is for those types of situations, for those instruments, we will halt trading 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 in that cascade of that corporate action has taken place. We then reopen that for trading and have an orderly market for those instruments 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. And all that data has worked its way through to where it needs to be.

Got it. I mean, since you guys mentioned....

Just to touch on that a little bit that.

Sure, Robb.

We give out a report 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 1 of the major data vendors distributing the Blue Ocean data, I just want to -- I do want to share with the audience here. We deliver Blue Ocean market data fees via ICE Consolidated Feed, which is our low latency streaming market data product. So customers 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, so streaming data can be connect 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 [ stores ] globally and across asset classes, including the equity derivatives, fixed income, FX, ETF and crypto. So this product is widely used by our Tier 1 banks, asset managers, hedge funds and redistributor globally worldwide as well. So 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 in to more questions, just a quick reminder to the audience here. [Operator Instructions] Well, thank you both sharing with the audience so far. I think is very insightful. I can see the ATS, Blue Ocean ATS, short for 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 clock of U.S. trading become a trend here in Asia? If yes, do you see where they started and how they spread out in the market? And how does Blue Ocean driving this trend right now? Maybe, Robb, do you want to.

Yes, sure. So 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., name of the company's Gamida, with tickers GMDA. They are a biotech company. And after the market closed on Monday in the U.S., the FDA announced approval for their stem cell therapy for blood cancer. So the people that didn't have access to Blue Ocean, we're going to have to wait till Tuesday. But on Blue Ocean platform -- and I just want to consult the numbers so I get that right, though. So it closed in the U.S., in 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 2 million shares single counted with a notional over $2 million. Now it didn't open in the U.S. on Tuesday. Until the U.S. opened, it was at a $1.61, so you had that $0.30 of real price to be able to have access to with Blue Ocean.

Yes. Yes, that's great. So really, you can see that [indiscernible] spread actually created a really good liquidity in the market. John, any comments on that?

No, I think Rob covered it well. I just want to clarify 1 thing though, as I'm looking through some of the comments we've received. So Blue Ocean as a lit venue means that we're an order book-driven marketplace, so 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. So just to clarify that point, so 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 into 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. So in that sense, we replicate exactly the user experience anyone should expect to have during any other trading session.

This is a...

And I just want to add 1 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. And this is compared with the dark pool you just referred to where you don't see the order from the other side and everything is [ smashed ] by the broker, right?

Right Yes. So we're fully transparent pre-trade and post-trade in that respect. Good, Great. I think we received a lot of questions. I think we probably take more time to jump into the Q&A session and to answer the question from the audience, so make sure that we have enough time to cover all the questions here. There are lots of questions here. I will pick up those questions. I try to assign a question to the right speaker, including myself. Let's see who they are. One second.

One of the questions saying, apologies, 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 questions when we talk to the customers. As a client of 1 of the registered broker, do I just settle the trade with my broker and my broker will settle with Blue Ocean? And who is the clearing house. I think this is for Robb or maybe like John or Robb or -- who you think this -- Robb, by all means.

I think John touched on it. And I think -- and John could just iterate what he said before.

Right. Well, so 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. So to the extent that somebody is trading any other U.S. equity markets right now, they have their brokers 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 NYSE TRF as far as that post-trade transparency. And simultaneously, we're sending that through as well to our clearing partners such that those become settled just like any other trades. So there's no differentiation. There's nothing that is in [ asterisks ] in that respect. It'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 in the morning when that is possible for us to report for the trading session that then begins typically at 4 in the morning for all other venues. We're making our reports at that point in time from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. at that 4 a.m. window when that reporting opportunity opens for us.

That 4 a.m., that's 8 p.m. hour or the U.S. hour? Sorry, just....

Sorry. When I made those comments, those are Eastern standard time, so 8 p.m. Eastern Time to 4 a.m., so in New York time.

Got it. Okay. Robb, do you want to further comment on that?

No. I think John said it perfectly, and 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. So whoever the broker is would face Blue Ocean, and those 2 would face each other and clear and settle, and then we report it to the consolidating team.

Great. Okay. We have another question, very interesting. Why not offering all stocks trading outside U.S. trading hour, and what's the consideration? I think there's a lot of customers also ask us when we introduced Blue Ocean data fee, how many stocks available, who are they? Any comments, both?

I mean, we have -- since we are a registered broker dealer, we could add any NMS listed stock to our platform. We started with the large, popular ones, and then we're going with the view of what the customer decides. So if we see demand from a customer and that is a liquid name, we will talk to 1 of our liquidity providers and be able to add it on there. So even if they -- and I could give you real-life examples where we had 1 of the customers wanted to trade an Indian ADR, and it wasn't on there currently. We went to some of our liquidity providers. They added it the next day, and they've been trading it ever since. So even if they don't see it on there, if we know there's a demand on it, we can add it.

But No, there's another 1, [ against ] what's ICE -- 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. So doesn't really matter where you are, in what region. If you're on most of the public cloud provider that's out there, industry regions of the local cloud providers, we also support. We'll be able to seamlessly deliver the real-time market data, the Blue Ocean market data into your cloud environment. And there's another one. This is a 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 its off trading hour for the U.S. market? This is an interesting one. Any comment on that?

I mean we -- our market is best bid, best offer. So whatever the top of the book is what that price is going to be.

Simple. And what do you need to set up as a broker dealer instead of just purely an ATS? I mean this is more -- more on what broker-dealer can connect. Not really sure that's the....

Yes. I think maybe this is more a question of nomenclature and nuance in that respect. So if you step back and you look at the overall market picture, you have a combination of exchanges and ATSs. So exchanges would be an NYSE or NASDAQ, for example, they have the ability to list the instruments and make it available as an IPO and then ultimately, primary trading there. And then ATSs or what are called secondary trading venue. So another location, hence, the alternative name where you can make available organized quoting and trading for those same stocks. And those -- all of those stocks, those U.S. listed stocks are what falls under Regulation National Market System or Reg NMS for short. And underneath that, if you're not an exchange and you're in ATS, technically speaking, you are a broker-dealer who is offering within your services that Alternative Trading System as 1 of your services to your clients. And so at a high level, we're an ATS. That's the essential thing to take note from here. But technically speaking, to be an ATS, you actually are a broker-dealer yourself. And 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 asset liquidity pool. This means our retail clients would get a live price feed when trading on your platform? Question mark. I think that's....

Can you repeat that? Question.

Blue Ocean is a liquidity pool, so that means our retail customer will get a live price feed when they're trading on your platform? Yes or no?

Correct. So...

Yes. [ I see ] -- The full Level 2 book?

Exactly. And 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 -- the pricing side, how the specific stock price is reflected during the Asian hour? Without the market opening, how the price is reflected? I think first, how the market opening implosion works, right? And how does the market -- the price reflected. That related back to the liquidity, the transparency. I think it's worth [indiscernible] may be just [indiscernible].

Yes. So the reference price, we take from 30 minutes before Blue Ocean opens for what it was last traded. And then once it starts trading, that becomes the new reference price.

From the reference price, you mean from an exchange traded price?

Right. So after hours trading, we'll look at what it last traded at 30 minutes before Blue Ocean opens, and we'll set that as a reference price. So then once the market opens and it starts trading, then that naturally becomes the new reference price or whatever the last trade was.

Got it. Not the 1 -- I think this one is the same, asking the settlement process. Well, maybe worth mentioning again, which U.S. [ Clearer ] and brokers are able to support both at the moment? I think, Robb, you mentioned before. Maybe just try to emphasize and repeat it. You have documents to share later on, maybe just let the audience know as well.

Sure. So the -- what we call, as I said, the sponsored brokers are TD Cowen, Vision Financial, [ ViewTrade ], [ Castle Loop ] 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. So we're constantly getting new brokers to connect and test. And so 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 BOATS plan to engage with other countries in the APAC region? I think this is a very interesting question also related to your road map. By the way, ICE is -- with APAC, we covered so we can support both feeds basically everywhere in the APAC region. But to you, Robb.

Well, we -- this was an APAC-focused webinar so we kind of just kept the point on APAC. It's a very good question, and as John had mentioned earlier, risk does travel around the world and people are going to want to manage that risk. Maybe they don't get the opportunity of all 8 hours as they do in Asia. But 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. And so 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. So if anyone actually -- we have a pretty full schedule and it's exciting, but we could always find time for more. So 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. And John, do you want to kind of go into more of the strategy on that?

Well, not to take too much time on this topic, but I think 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 -- or 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. And as far as what Robb 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. And we're essentially pursuing a lot of parallel conversations. So 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 an interesting and critical part of overall U.S. equity trade flows. And again, the only 1 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, Robb and myself for any question related to 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 subscribe? Again, I mean, we keep emphasizing that. Apparently, this is -- this is the -- 1 of the key questions our customers want to know how to connect, right? Robb, do we have any document or there's a broker we can share with the audience?

Yes. I mean I think it depends on the region. If they're in Korea, I think we pretty much have every single broker that is trading [indiscernible]. In Hong Kong, it's just been going live. We have more firms coming on. CIMB in Singapore is live. We have -- as I said, there's -- we have a large European bulge bracket that's in the final testing stages. That's going to do that. But 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. But anyone can reach out directly to me and if they tell me what 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 will be the simplest way to send an e-mail to you on this e-mail address on the screen. Great. Why do you think Korea market was able to be the first mover of U.S. trading in Asian time? Needs -- from the needs from retail or the regulation is not strict compared with other countries like Singapore, Japan and Hong Kong. I think there's 2 questions here. Why is the first mover? And any changed 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 of the brokers, it was like, well, who else is connected? Why don't you call me back when other people do it? And we've seen an absolute first-mover advantage. Samsung first broker to connect to the platform. I think they did about 1 billion notional in around 3 months. They picked up in a hypercompetitive market, around 4% of that market, so it was -- that kind of let it. And then once they went in, they kind of went into hyperdrive that way. So for those people that are listening that are on the fence about it, if they want to do it, there's absolute proof of the first mover advantage. 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 are probably not going to come back to that. So our queue, it is getting deeper and deeper but it's going to be harder to come in. So as I said, my suggestion would be to try to connect as quickly as possible.

Yes. I think we're definitely creating a trend. We see Korea move first. And the other places like Hong Kong or Japan, we see a lot of brokers and institutions also connecting to the venue. So definitely a great news for this -- the new content, data content. Sorry, maybe we still have time for maybe 2 more. Are there any circuit breaker type of mechanism implemented? This is very interesting. I assume this is talking about during the U.S. trading hour, if the movement of the price is significant, there will be a circuit breaker. Are there any circuit breaker implemented in Blue Ocean currently?

I can jump in on this and then share a couple of comments. So Robb earlier made reference to checking the 7:30 p.m. price Eastern time ahead of our 8 p.m. Eastern time close [indiscernible] market open. And 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. And we do have what we would call price spends 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. And so essentially, what that really means is you should 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 substantial volatility in price. It's not a circuit breaker as such, but it is a way for us to essentially have a risk filter in that respect. But 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.

And 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 BOATS Blue Ocean look into introducing derivative instruments in the future? Very, very interesting. Robb, do you want to comment on that?

I can, or John, I know that that's 1 of your sweet spots you'd like to talk about. Do you want me to [indiscernible] it over to you?

Sure. I can't make any comment at this point about things like derivative 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. And so progressively, not just being the particular hour set where we are the exclusive venue of the ATS markets available, but also into what's known as the pre and the post-market. So essentially 4 a.m. to market open, again, times are quoted here as Eastern. And from the post session, so going towards that 8 p.m. time frame, we'll 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. So that would be an ultimate goal, and that's all related to equities and ETFs and things that, again, followed in that Reg NMS instrument sets. And 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 it's time to wrap up. [Operator Instructions] I would like to thank you very much for our wonderful speakers, Robb 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 incredibly valuable. We appreciate your time and effort dedicated to this webinar. Thank you both.

I want to thank you for organizing this, inviting, and we're excited to work together closely with ICE going forward. So -- and to thank the audience for listening to us.

Appreciate that. I also want to thank our attendees to join -- for joining us today and participating in this section. 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. So please know that a recording of 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 attend this event to understand what's Blue Ocean and how Blue Ocean and ICE can help you in training this new liquidity venue. So once again, thank you to all the speakers and attendees for making this webinar a success, and we look forward to seeing you at our future events. Thank you.