National Market Offers. The National Market section (top) of the Limit Order Book (LOB) shows the National Best Bid and Offer (NBBO), including price levels and share sizes, for the two securities that comprise your barter order.

Your barter order can be filled at NBBO prices only if the NBBO sizes equal or exceed your barter order quantities for both the buy-side and sell-side. If your order cannot be filled on the NBBO market, the system looks beneath the NBBO market to determine the national offer for your barter order.

Click to learn how markets in individual securities are used to generate national market offers for your barter order.

Marketmaker Offers. BarterSecurities provides a marketmaker toolkit that allows professional marketmakers to respond to barter orders automatically in real-time. Using the toolkit, marketmakers measure the attractiveness of any incoming barter order, and specify how aggressively or passively to respond to it, either automatically or manually, using customized trading decision rules.

For example, attractive orders might have the dollar amounts of the buy- and sell- sides almost equal, with stocks that exhibit a close industry match and high liquidity. A marketmaker could choose to show an automatic offer for these types of orders at the corresponding National Best Bid and Offer (NBBO) price reduced by 20% of the NBBO spread, for the current NBBO size.

"Implied" Offers. Additional internal offers may arise due to outstanding limit orders, either alone or in combination. For example, a limit order to buy INTC and sell CSCO, and a second order to buy CSCO and sell MSFT, can be combined to create a barter order to buy INTC and sell MSFT. Therefore, the first two orders may create an implied offer for an incoming barter order to buy MSFT and sell INTC. Implied offers can be created by any number of barter limit orders in various ratios. To learn more, click Order Matching.