PennyStocksNow.com
Weekly Promotional Intelligence
The Automated Two: Why Two Firms Quietly Run Three Quarters of Market Making Disclosures
Ninety-one market making engagements sit in the year to date filing record. Sixty-eight of them, seventy-five percent, name one of exactly two firms: Independent Trading Group or ICP Securities. Not one filing names both. Every issuer that hires an automated market maker in this dataset is choosing between two providers, and choosing only one, and the remaining thirteen firms in the tier are splitting the other quarter between them in single digit counts. That is not a fragmented market. That is a duopoly wearing the costume of a commoditised service.
The repeat players piece established that a small cluster of firms runs most of the promotional market. The ICP tell went further and argued that one specific operator's engagements, read against timing and context, carry a signal the raw hire does not. Neither piece asked the more basic structural question this issue is built to answer: how concentrated is the market making tier itself, and what does it mean that issuers are effectively choosing between a duopoly rather than shopping a market.
The Split — 91 Market Making Engagements, YTD
Why Zero Overlap Is the Tell, Not the Concentration
The headline number, seventy-five percent, is the kind of statistic that invites an easy explanation: two firms are simply better, cheaper, or faster at closing the paperwork, and the market has consolidated around efficiency the way most commoditised services eventually do. That explanation does not need zero overlap to be true. If issuers were rationally converging on the two best providers, you would still expect some names to shop both, take a quote from each, or switch between them opportunistically the way companies do with market makers in the broader record.
That is not what the filing record shows. Not one of the sixty-eight engagements names both firms, not concurrently and not as a same-issuer switch inside the observed window. Whatever is driving the choice between Independent Trading Group and ICP Securities is not price discovery across two similar vendors. It behaves more like two separate distribution channels that rarely intersect, each with its own referral path, venue focus, or introducer relationship, and an issuer that lands in one channel does not appear to sample the other.
Not one filing names both firms. Every issuer chooses a channel, not a vendor.
What a Duopoly Structure Changes About Reading the Hire
The ICP tell built a six-gate framework for reading a single ICP Securities engagement as a possible leading indicator, on the argument that the standardised cheque makes the surrounding filings the signal. The structural point here is narrower but sits underneath that framework: if seventy-five percent of the tier's activity runs through two channels that do not overlap, then the identity of the firm itself may carry less information than which of the two channels an issuer is sitting in. A company that engages Independent Trading Group is drawing from a pool of forty-three other issuers that did the same thing, through what looks like a single pipeline. A company that engages ICP Securities is drawing from a different, smaller pool. Neither pool tells you about the company. Both tell you something about which door the issuer walked through to get liquidity infrastructure at all, and that door was apparently closed to whichever firm they did not choose.
The Long Tail Is the Control Group
The thirteen-plus firms sharing the remaining twenty-five percent are the closest thing this dataset has to a genuine competitive market: one or two engagements each, no repeat pattern, no discernible pipeline. That group is what a fragmented, shopped-around market making tier would look like if it were the whole picture. It is not the whole picture. It is the residue left over after two firms absorbed most of the volume, and its existence is useful mainly as a contrast: it shows the tier is capable of supporting a dozen different vendors, and issuers overwhelmingly are not using that optionality.
What to Watch For
The seventy-five percent figure is a year to date snapshot and will move as new filings arrive; it is not a fixed law of the tier. What is worth tracking is whether the zero-overlap pattern holds as the record grows, because a single filing naming both firms, or a documented switch from one to the other on the same issuer, would be the first evidence that the two channels actually compete rather than simply coexist. Until that shows up, the more useful read is not which market maker did this issuer choose but which of the two dominant channels was available to them, since the filing record so far suggests that was closer to the actual decision than an open comparison across the tier.
None of this speaks to the quality of either firm's liquidity provision, and nothing here implies Independent Trading Group or ICP Securities perform any function beyond the arm's length market making service each discloses. The concentration is a fact about issuer access to the tier, not a judgment about either provider's competence.
Was this forwarded to you?
Every week we publish sector intelligence sourced directly from SEC, TSXV, and CSE promotional filings. Sign up free and know where the money is going before the volume hits.
Subscribe Free at PennyStocksNow.comPennyStocksNow.com
All data sourced from SEC, TSXV, and CSE public filings, reflecting market making engagements observed in the 2026 year to date filing record as of July 13, 2026. Concentration figures are counts of named-firm engagements, not dollar volume, and will shift as new filings are added. Market making is a legitimate, arm's length liquidity service; nothing here implies either firm named performs any promotional function. For informational purposes only. Not investment advice.