Execution Quality in the NYSE Market

The share of electronic order books (EOBs) in the NYSE market has grown from 53% to 55% since Celent’s last execution quality report. By comparison, the specialists/DMMs have seen their share has decline marginally from 34% to 33%. Market makers’ share has declined from 12% to 11%.

In a new report, Execution Quality in the NYSE Market, Celent analyzes over 16 billion orders over the period of January 1, 2012 to March 31, 2012. In total, the report by Anshuman Jaswal, senior analyst with Celent’s Securities & Investments group, measures and ranks 155 market participants according to their execution speed and prices obtained for incoming orders.

NYSE Arca is the leading market center, followed by the two BATS Exchanges. The firms that have performed well with regard to price include Citadel Securities and UBS Securities. Similarly, Barclays Specialists has been a strong performer when it comes to average execution speed.

Table 1 gives the overall rankings for the leading venues of the NYSE issues. The price rankings are led by Liquidnet, Wells Fargo Securities, and LeveL ATS. Similarly, BATS Y-Exchange, BATS Exchange, and Barclays Specialists are the best performers when it comes to speed of execution among market centers.

Among the market makers, BofA Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs have shown the best price improvement across the categories that were assessed in this study. For speed of execution, Morgan Stanley, Citadel Securities, and Goldman Sachs have performed the best. Hence, comparing for both price and speed, we find that Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are the best performing market makers.