VIRT Company Profile

Virtu is a leading technology-enabled market maker and liquidity provider to the global financial markets. We stand ready, at any time, to buy or sell a broad range of securities and other financial instruments, and we generate revenue by buying and selling securities and other financial instruments and earning small bid/ask spreads across a large volume of transactions. We make markets by providing quotations to buyers and sellers in more than 12,000 securities and other financial instruments on more than 230 unique exchanges, markets and liquidity pools in 35 countries around the world. We believe that our broad diversification, in combination with our proprietary technology platform and low-cost structure, enables us to facilitate risk transfer between global capital markets participants by supplying liquidity and competitive pricing while at the same time earning attractive margins and returns.

We believe that market makers like us serve an important role in maintaining and improving the overall health and efficiency of the global capital markets by continuously posting bids and offers for financial instruments and thereby providing to market participants an efficient means to transfer risk. All market participants benefit from the increased liquidity, lower overall trading costs and enhanced execution certainty that we provide. While we do not have customers in a traditional sense, we make markets for global banks, brokers and other intermediaries, and indirectly provide services to retail and institutional investors, including corporations, individuals, hedge funds, mutual funds, pension funds and other investors, all of whom can access our liquidity on exchanges or venues in order to transfer risk in multiple securities and asset classes for their own accounts and/or on behalf of their customers.

We refer to our market making activities as being “market neutral,” which means that we are not dependent on the direction of any particular market nor do we speculate. Our market making activities are designed to minimize capital at risk at any given time by limiting the notional size of our positions. Our strategies are also designed to lock in returns through precise hedging in the primary instrument or in one or more economically equivalent instruments, as we seek to eliminate the price risk in any positions held. Our revenue generation is driven primarily by transaction volume across a broad range of securities and other financial instruments, asset classes and geographies. We avoid the risk of long or short positions in favor of seeking to earn small bid/ask spreads on large trading volumes across thousands of securities and financial instruments.

We do not engage in the types of principal investing and predictive, momentum and signal trading in which many other broker-dealers and trading firms engage. In fact, in order to minimize the likelihood of unintended activities by our market making strategies, if our risk management system detects a trading strategy generating revenues outside of our preset limits, it will freeze, or “lockdown,” that strategy and alert risk management personnel and management. Although this approach may prevent us from maximizing potential returns in times of extreme market volatility, we believe the reduction in risk is an appropriate trade-off that is in keeping with our aim of generating consistently strong revenue from trading.

Our market making activities employ the following three basic strategies: a “single instrument” market making strategy, a “one to one” market making strategy and a “one to many” market making strategy. The single instrument market making strategy involves actively quoting in a single instrument with the intention of profiting by capturing the spread between the bid and offer. This strategy places buy orders, or bids, and sell orders, or offers, in the market for the subject instrument at or near the inside of the market with the intention of achieving an execution. If another market participant executes against the strategy’s bid or offer by crossing the spread, the strategy will attempt to exit the position by continuing to quote on the opposite side of the market in order to execute an offsetting position. The one to one market making strategy involves continuously quoting a two-sided market in a single instrument with the intention of either capturing the spread in the primary instrument or locking in a return by hedging in a different but economically similar instrument. The one to many market making strategy involves continuously quoting a two-sided market in a primary instrument (typically an ETF) with the intention of either capturing the spread in the primary instrument or attempting to lock in a return by hedging in a basket of instruments that represent an economically equivalent value to the primary instrument.

Technology and operational efficiency are at the core of our business, and our focus on market making technology is a key element of our success. We have developed a proprietary, multi-asset, multi-currency technology platform that is highly reliable, scalable and modular, and we integrate directly with exchanges and other liquidity centers. Our market data, order routing, transaction processing, risk management and market surveillance technology modules manage our market making activities in an efficient manner and enable us to scale our market making activities globally and across additional securities and other financial instruments and asset classes without significant incremental costs or third-party licensing or processing fees.

We are a self-clearing registered broker-dealer in the U.S. and are registered with the Central Bank of Ireland for our European trading. We participate on more than 230 unique exchanges, and register as a market maker or liquidity provider and/or enter into direct obligations to provide liquidity on nearly every exchange or venue that offers such programs. We engage regularly with regulators around the world on issues affecting electronic trading and have been a proponent with the SEC of affirmative market making obligations for electronic market makers in U.S. equities in an effort to enhance the transparency and liquidity provided to capital markets. In the U.S., we conduct our business from our headquarters in New York, New York and our trading center in Austin, Texas. Abroad, we conduct our business through trading centers located in Dublin and Singapore.