[sjbase]

An ATS is like an exchange, so we match buyers and sellers. And you guessed correctly that the initial users are institutional investors - or more directly their brokers. So initially we'll have institutions creating and sending in "Expressive Bids" to improve their execution performance, and to express trades they currently can't via plain limit orders.

That said, we'd love to get to the point where E-Trade etc. are offering combinatorial bidding to retail traders, with us on the back end.

[jpthurman]

Thanks. Obviously I'm not a direct user of your technology and so maybe this is not intended for me but if you could translate your "A" and "B" into a hard, real-life example that I could understand I would be empowered to be an advocate for you. Best of luck to you.

[sjbase]

No worries, happy to concretize this: the really easy example would be shoes. How much would you pay for just a right shoe or just a left shoe? A lot less than the pair, since you might not be able to find the other shoe in the right size, condition, etc. Same with the seller - they don't want to be stuck trying offload a single left shoe.

In stocks, A might be a company you invested in and B some ETF that you bought as a hedge for A. What if you sell out of A, and then the price of the ETF drops? There's value in being able to liquidate the full position - the single stock plus the hedge - at once.