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The Investors Exchange ( IEX; also known as the IEX Exchange) is a stock exchange in the United States. It was founded in 2012 in order to mitigate the effects of high-frequency trading. IEX was launched as a national securities exchange in September 2016. On October 24, 2017, it received regulatory approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to list companies. IEX listed its first public company, Interactive Brokers, on October 5, 2018. The exchange said that companies would be able to list for free for the first five years, before a flat annual rate of $50,000. On September 23, 2019, it announced it was leaving its listing business.
In September 2019, IEX announced that its co-founder and COO, John Schwall, would retire from the company by the end of 2019.
The genesis and early days of the exchange are chronicled in the 2014 book by Michael Lewis.
In 2020, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec made a strategic investment in IEX Group.
After a 13-month wait, on October 24, 2017, IEX Group Inc. received regulatory approval from the SEC to list companies. IEX said it would begin listings in early 2018, with a focus on having companies switch over from other stock exchanges by undercutting the listing fees of rivals. The exchange said that companies would be able to list for free for the first five years, before a flat annual rate of $50,000. In comparison, NYSE had annual listing fees as high as $500,000 and Nasdaq up to $155,000. The Wall Street Journal wrote that the approval paved "the way for the first competition to the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq Inc. in nearly a decade... Companies seeking to list their shares on a U.S. exchange haven’t had a choice besides NYSE or Nasdaq since 2008, when the American Stock Exchange was acquired by NYSE." Only Wynn Resorts Ltd. said publicly that it was considering a listing on IEX at the time of the approval announcement, with IEX not releasing more details on listings.
IEX won the 2025 Global Markets Choice Award for 'Most Innovative Exchange' in June 2025.
These strategies are intended to ensure the trustworthiness of the exchange. A few dark pools are owned by trading companies that pay for certain types of orders to allow them to fill orders within the pool, rather than routing orders to public exchanges. IEX offers no rebates for orders, and only charges a flat fee of $0.0009 per share on trades executed within the dark pool (or 0.30% with shares worth less than $1.00). Trades forwarded to other are charged a lower rate.
IEX has five order types: market, limit, primary peg (pegged to national best bid/offer), midpoint peg and patent-pending discretionary peg. IEX discretionary peg is a primary peg that may execute at up to midpoint price when the quote is stable. A few optional parameters can be attached to the orders, leaving IEX with many fewer order types than most other exchanges.
IEX employs a 38-mile fiber coil in New Jersey, introducing a 350μs 'speed bump' that equalizes data arrival to its points of presence. Traders are not allowed to co-locate equipment adjacent to IEX's own servers, unlike many other trading platforms. IEX has its own low-latency links to other trading venues in the New York region, which it can use to execute trades for customers in under 320 microseconds. The point-of-presence links for traders to gain access to IEX have a built-in, round-trip delay of 700 microseconds from a 38-mile coil of fiber, so traders cannot beat IEX's own computers as orders propagate outward. The data delay prevents many predatory behaviors.
- It deters the practice of liquidity fading, where they peer into various trading venues and try to detect orders as they propagate from a broker's order router, and use this information to withdraw liquidity ahead of toxic order flow.
(Source: IEX)
When IEX applied for exchange status, it dropped the broker-based priority mechanism and as an exchange it gives priority to the best price first followed by the time of order submittal (as do other exchanges).
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