Retail Price Improvement (RPI) Orders

The Retail Price Improvement (RPI) order is a liquidity-adding order that works within the parameters of the NASDAQ Retail Price Improvement program. This program allows qualified stock orders to fill against eligible, hidden RPI orders that offer price improvement over the current best bid and offer.

Customers submitting an RPI order must specify an offset (which is the minimum price improvement amount) of at least 0.001. The order's limit price is used as the price cap for the order which, when submitted, acts like a relative order and is pegged to the best bid (for a buy) and the best offer (for a sell) plus or minus the required offset. Once submitted, the RPI order is routed to a separate book at the NASDAQ where it is eligible to interact with qualified orders.

Notes:

The Reference Table to the upper right provides a general summary of the order type characteristics. The checked features are applicable in some combination, but do not necessarily work in conjunction with all other checked features. For example, if Options and Stocks, US and Non-US, and Smart and Directed are all checked, it does not follow that all US and Non-US Smart and direct-routed stocks support the order type. It may be the case that only Smart-routed US Stocks, direct-routed Non-US stocks and Smart-routed US Options are supported.


Products Availability Routing TWS
Stocks* US Products Smart Attribute
Non-US Products Directed Order Type
Time in Force
*Supported only for US stocks listed on NASDAQ.
Open Users' Guide

Example

The current NBBO for shares of stock XYZ is $10.10 – 10.11. You create a sell order for 500 shares and select RPI as the order type. You enter 0.001 as the offset, which is the minimum price improvement amount. You then enter 10.10 as the limit price which acts as a price cap for the order. For the sell order, this is the lowest price you are willing to accept.

The RPI order goes in at 10.109 (Best Offer – Offset, or 10.11 – 0.001). If a buy order comes in at 10.109, it will hit this offer and fill.

  • If the Best Offer goes up, the RPI price will be recalculated so that if remains better than the best offer.
  • If the Best Offer drops past a certain price, for example if it goes to 10.10, the RPI order would no longer be eligible to interact with qualified orders, as the required price improvement would violate the order's specified price cap of 10.10 (10.10 – 0.001 = 10.099). However, the order will remain in the system and may again become eligible to interact with orders if the Best Offer comes back into the range where the price improvement amount would no longer violate the price cap.
Assumptions
Action SELL
Quantity 500
Order Type RPI
Market Price (NBBO) $10.10 – 10.11
Limit Price (Price Cap) 10.10
Offset (Minimum Price Improvement) 0.001