Latest News About Tick Size

Updated 2026-06-18 15:03

The tick size refers to the minimum price movement at which securities can trade. Discussions around tick sizes focus on how they impact liquidity, trading costs, and overall market efficiency. Regulators have conducted studies on tick-size pilots to gauge their effects on small-cap stocks, with the goal of enhancing liquidity and minimizing trading expenses when appropriate. However, these initiatives aim to avoid excessive price discreteness, which can have adverse consequences. Research and pilot programs have provided insight into the relationship between tick sizes and microstructure noise, suggesting that larger ticks can reduce unnecessary market noise and improve overall market functionality.

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[PDF] Tick Size Wars: The Market Quality Effects of Pricing Grid Competition

reduced their tick size immediately captured market shares of both quoted and executed volume from the exchanges that kept their ticks large. We find that tick size competition improves market quality, reducing trading costs and increasing market-wide depth and volume. These market quality improvements are strongest in stocks where the bid-ask spread was constrained to one tick, where … 2 Tick Size Wars were able to undercut the tick sizes of the primary exchanges. We find that competitive...

ba-odegaard.no

Investor Alert: Tick Size Pilot Program – What Investors Need To Know

Beginning October 3, 2016, a new National Market System (NMS) Plan to implement a Tick Size Pilot Program (the “pilot”) will widen the minimum quoting and trading increment —sometimes called the “tick size” — for some small capitalization stocks. The goal of the pilot is to study the effect of tick size on liquidity and trading of small capitalization stocks. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) Office of Investor Education and...

www.investor.gov

Tick Sizes and Market Quality:

characterize our findings. First, for small trades a wider tick size increases the cost to trade for tick constrained stocks but decreases it for stocks with wide spreads. These results are consistent with the fundamental price fidelity versus complexity/undercutting concerns associated with a tick size change. The second result is that for all stocks the effect of a larger tick size becomes more

www.sec.gov