The U.S. equities market has experienced substantial growth in 2025, with Average Daily Volume (ADV) reaching 17.6 billion shares in the third quarter, a 53% year-over-year increase. Following this volume growth, the percentage of off-exchange trading increased to over 50% during the third quarter of 2025, up 8.26% year-over-year. This increase continues a multi-year trend that emphasizes growing interest in dark, or non-displayed execution. Cboe’s equities exchanges offer traders the ability to minimize market impact and improve performance through the use of dark orders. Cboe has observed growth in on-exchange non-displayed volumes alongside off-exchange growth, as clients seek both the benefits of dark execution — price improvement, reduced market impact and anonymity, combined with the resiliency and oversight of trading on exchange.
Figure 1: U.S. Equities Average Daily Volume and Off-Exchange Percentage Source: SIP
Across Cboe venues, non-displayed volumes have risen alongside overall volume growth, with a significant increase in the percentage of volume executed in the dark. In the third quarter of 2025, 18.2% of Cboe’s total volume was executed in the dark, a 35.8% increase compared to the third quarter of 2024. According to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) MIDAS data, non-displayed volume is growing across multiple on-exchange venues, reflecting a market-wide shift toward non-displayed trading.
Figure 2: Non-Displayed Average Daily Volume and Percentage of Non-Displayed Volume on Cboe’s Venues Source: Cboe Internal Data
Cboe offers several premium non-displayed execution products, including Quote Depletion Protection (QDP), Retail Price Improvement (RPI) and Periodic Auctions (PA), that deliver sophisticated dark liquidity execution with measurable price improvement and superior execution quality. These products have demonstrated growth alongside the broader shift toward non-displayed trading. Among Cboe’s premium hidden products on Cboe EDGA® Equities Exchange (EDGA) and Cboe EDGX® Equities Exchange (EDGX), QDP had the strongest growth between the first quarter of 2022 and the third quarter of 2025. EDGX QDP ADV increased 277% to 29.2 million shares and EDGA QDP ADV grew 513% to 6.2 million shares. More recently, Periodic Auctions have shown strong momentum, growing 88% from the first quarter of 2025 to the third quarter of 2025.
Superior Execution Quality
Superior execution quality is a key differentiator for Cboe’s premium non-displayed products. Markouts measure adverse selection by quantifying the price slippage an order experiences after execution, making them a critical metric for assessing execution performance. QDP orders on EDGX delivered measurably better execution quality in the third quarter of 2025, outperforming non-displayed orders by 1-2% of spread and displayed orders by 3-7% of spread, as measured by mid-to-mid notionally weighted markouts. This performance advantage reflects QDP’s ability to intelligently manage discretion, minimizing adverse selection while capturing price improvement opportunities.
Figure 3: EDGX Post Trade Markout: Q3 2025 Source: Cboe Internal Data
The same trend holds for Cboe’s premium products on Cboe BYX® Equities Exchange (BYX). From July to September 2025, Periodic Auctions outperformed both non-displayed orders (better by 5-8% of spread) and displayed orders (better by 9-16% of spread) in mid-to-mid notionally weighted markouts. This execution quality advantage is especially valuable when wider spreads, reduced depth and limited competition make sourcing liquidity without market impact challenging. By batching orders, Periodic Auctions maintain superior execution performance across a wide range of securities.
RPI orders similarly demonstrate strong execution quality. In the third quarter of 2025, markouts were approximately 4-8% of spread better than displayed orders. This performance reflects RPI’s ability to minimize adverse selection by interacting exclusively with retail flow.
Figure 4: BYX Post Trade Markout: Q3 2025 Source: Cboe Internal Data
Each of the premium products offer different trading benefits depending on client needs. While all three leverage non-displayed liquidity to minimize market impact, they serve distinct execution objectives: protecting against adverse selection (QDP), accessing retail liquidity (RPI) and aggregating liquidity through scheduled auctions (PA). Below, we explore the unique advantages and performance characteristics of each product.
Quote Depletion Protection (QDP)
QDP is an optional instruction that market participants can use in conjunction with Midpoint Discretionary Orders (MDOs) on Cboe’s EDGX® and EDGA® Equities Exchanges. When activated, QDP disables an MDO’s discretionary range for a short period when the exchange’s quote indicates the price may move in a manner that could result in a more aggressive execution price.
Signal accuracy is crucial, especially with QDP’s recent growth. In 2025 on EDGX, the QDP signal was accurate approximately 74% of the time when triggered, with the quote moving in the opposite direction only 3.9% of the time, and the remaining 22% of the time is neutral with the quote not moving.
The conversion of EDGA from an inverted market to maker-taker in November 2024 improved QDP’s prediction accuracy. Correct predictions increased by 26.96% from October to November 2024, and accuracy continued improving through October 2025, gaining an additional +16.71% to exceed 69%.
As shown above in EDGX Post Trade Markout in Figure 3 above, QDP execution quality outperforms non-displayed orders by 1-2% of spread and displayed orders by 3-7% of spread, as measured by mid-to-mid notionally weighted markouts. Similar results are found on EDGA where QDP markouts outperformed non-displayed orders by 1-6%. This performance advantage stems from QDP’s intelligent discretion management, which minimizes adverse selection while maximizing price improvement opportunities.
Retail Price Improvement (RPI)
RPI orders on Cboe’s BYX Exchange allow liquidity providers to offer price improvement in sub-penny increments ($0.001 better than NBBO) exclusively to retail flow. This creates a unique market structure where retail investors gain access to price-improved liquidity not available to non-retail order flow. For liquidity providers, RPI orders provide continuous access to high-quality retail flow that is unavailable elsewhere. Liquidity providers can passively capture marketable retail demand throughout the trading day, offering an efficient alternative to aggressive liquidity-seeking strategies. Retail orders executing against RPI orders benefit from price improvement, receiving an average of $0.0012 per share in price improvement during the first three quarters of 2025, a meaningful enhancement that compounds across large order volumes. This price improvement is in addition to the augmented rebate received on BYX when retail orders remove liquidity against RPI or other non-displayed orders.
Figure 5: Total Retail Shares Submitted to BYX Source: Cboe Internal Data
There is a large opportunity to interact with retail order flow on BYX, with the ADV of retail orders on BYX peaking at 142 million shares in January 2025, and remaining above 90 million shares per month throughout the year. In 2025, 96% of these marketable retail orders are set to only interact with price-improving orders, highlighting a consistent presence of retail activity that is specifically seeking price improvement. Of these retail shares, only an average of 3.4 million shares, representing 3.2% of the marketable retail flow entered, were executed. This leaves over 100 million shares of unexecuted retail shares available to interact with on BYX daily. Daily reports on the RPI missed opportunity can be found on the Cboe website. In our previous analysis, Cboe found that combined large and mid-cap stocks comprised 45% of the total missed retail opportunities, while securities tied to the S&P 500 Index and Russell 1000 Index accounted for 14% of the missed opportunity between January 2023 and March 2024. Read more about the benefits and opportunities of RPI here.
Cboe plans to introduce an Enhanced Retail Price Improvement (ERPI) order type on BYX, pending regulatory approval. Like standard RPI orders, ERPI orders are non-displayed and eligible to execute against contra-side retail orders in $0.001 increments, ranked at their limit price. The key difference is that ERPI orders offers the user to ability to specify a step-up range—a maximum execution price for buy orders or minimum execution price for sell orders—which allows retail liquidity providers to post orders at a specific limit price with the opportunity to “step up” to provide a greater amount of price improvement as compared to other higher priority resting orders. This will allow users to position themselves to earn price priority by offering meaningful price improvement.
Periodic Auctions
Periodic Auctions is another value-add product available on BYX. Cboe’s Periodic Auctions offer a unique opportunity to source liquidity through 100 millisecond auctions triggered by crossing interest, with minimal market impact. This year, there has been an increase in the use of Periodic Auctions, reaching a peak in October 2025 with an ADV of over 170,000 shares traded. In October, in just the top 250 names, there were more than 170 million shares sent to BYX eligible to participate in a Periodic Auction, with 54% of these shares in names that are S&P 500 Index constituents. Cboe sends weekly Periodic Auction missed opportunities reports highlighting total volume, orders, average order size, duration and price by symbol for all volume that could have executed in a Periodic Auction. To receive these reports, please reach out to your account manager. For more information on Periodic Auctions and how to incorporate them into your trading strategies, read our recent analysis.
With the use of our premium products, clients can achieve anonymity and reduced market impact with superior execution quality. Please reach out to Cboe’s North American Cash Equities Team with questions and to learn how we can help optimize your trading experience. Read more on our previous insights here.
