The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) requests comment on proposed amendments to FINRA Rule 5210 to require that member firms receive a customer order in a security before displaying a quotation or indication of interest (IOI) in a way that purports to represent that the quotation or IOI originated with a customer. Similarly, a firm could not continue to display a quotation or IOI as representing a customer order once the customer order was executed or cancelled.

Indications of interest are non-firm expressions of trading interest that contain one or more of the following elements: security name, side, size, capacity and/or price. Firms have the ability to communicate or advertise proprietary or customer trading interest in the form of IOIs to the marketplace through their own systems or several service providers that disseminate the information to subscribers and/or the marketplace. One attribute that is often associated with an IOI is whether the IOI originated with a customer (what is commonly referred to as a “natural” IOI), rather than with the firm.