Self-Regulatory Organizations; Cboe EDGX Exchange, Inc.; Notice of Filing and Immediate Effectiveness of a Proposed Rule Change To Update Its Fee Schedule To Provide a Discount on Fees Assessed to Qualifying Academic Purchasers for Purchases of Ad Hoc Historical U.S. Equity Short Volume and Trades Reports

<NOTICE> SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION <DEPDOC>[Release No. 34-102970; File No. SR-CboeEDGX-2025-032]</DEPDOC> <SUBJECT>Self-Regulatory Organizations; Cboe EDGX Exchange, Inc.; Notice of Filing and Immediate Effectiveness of a Proposed Rule Change To Update Its Fee Schedule To Provide a Discount on Fees Assessed to Qualifying Academic Purchasers for Purchases of Ad Hoc Historical U.S. Equity Short Volume and Trades Reports</SUBJECT> <DATE>May 2, 2025.</DATE> Pursuant to Section 19(b)(1) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (the “Act”), <SU>1</SU> <FTREF/> and Rule 19b-4 thereunder, <SU>2</SU> <FTREF/> notice is hereby given that on April 23, 2025, Cboe EDGX Exchange, Inc. (the “Exchange” or “EDGX”) filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “Commission”) the proposed rule change as described in Items I, II, and III below, which Items have been prepared by the Exchange. The Commission is publishing this notice to solicit comments on the proposed rule change from interested persons. <FTNT> <SU>1</SU>  15 U.S.C. 78s(b)(1). </FTNT> <FTNT> <SU>2</SU>  17 CFR 240.19b-4. </FTNT> <HD SOURCE="HD1">I. Self-Regulatory Organization's Statement of the Terms of Substance of the Proposed Rule Change</HD> The Exchange proposes to update its Fee Schedule to provide a discount on fees assessed to qualifying academic purchasers for purchases ad hoc historical U.S. Equity Short Volume and Trades Reports. The text of the proposed rule change is provided in Exhibit 5. The text of the proposed rule change is also available on the Exchange's website ( <E T="03">http://markets.cboe.com/us/options/regulation/rule_filings/edgx/</E> ), at the Exchange's Office of the Secretary, and at the Commission's Public Reference Room. <HD SOURCE="HD1">II. Self-Regulatory Organization's Statement of the Purpose of, and Statutory Basis for, the Proposed Rule Change</HD> In its filing with the Commission, the Exchange included statements concerning the purpose of and basis for the proposed rule change and discussed any comments it received on the proposed rule change. The text of these statements may be examined at the places specified in Item IV below. The Exchange has prepared summaries, set forth in sections A, B, and C below, of the most significant aspects of such statements. <HD SOURCE="HD2">A. Self-Regulatory Organization's Statement of the Purpose of, and Statutory Basis for, the Proposed Rule Change</HD> <HD SOURCE="HD3">1. Purpose</HD> The Exchange proposes to update its Fee Schedule to provide a discount on fees assessed to qualifying academic purchasers for purchases ad hoc historical U.S. Equity Short Volume and Trades Reports (“Short Volume Reports”). By way of background, the Short Volume Report is an end-of-day report that summarizes certain equity trading activity on the Exchange, including trade date, by symbol. <SU>7</SU> <FTREF/> The Short Volume Report also includes an end-of-month report that provides a record of all short sale transactions for the month, including trade date and time (in microseconds), by symbol and exchange. <SU>12</SU> <FTREF/> The Short Volume Report is a completely voluntary product, in that the Exchange is not required by any rule or regulation to make this data available and that potential customers may purchase it on an ad-hoc basis only if they voluntarily choose to do so. <FTNT> <SU>3</SU>  “Trade date” is the date of trading activity in yyyy-mm-dd format. </FTNT> <FTNT> <SU>4</SU>  “Total volume” is the total number of shares transacted. </FTNT> <FTNT> <SU>5</SU>  “Short volume” is the total number of shares sold short. </FTNT> <FTNT> <SU>6</SU>  “Short exempt volume” is the total number of shares sold short classified as exempt. </FTNT> <FTNT> <SU>7</SU>  “Symbol” refers to the Cboe formatted symbol in which the trading activity occurred. <E T="03">See https://cdn.cboe.com/resources/membership/US_Symbology_Reference.pdf.</E> </FTNT> <FTNT> <SU>8</SU>  “Trade date and time” is the date and time of trading activity in yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss.000000 ET format. </FTNT> <FTNT> <SU>9</SU>  “Trade size” is the number of shares transacted. </FTNT> <FTNT> <SU>10</SU>  “Trade price” is the price at which shares were transacted. </FTNT> <FTNT> <SU>11</SU>  “Short type” is a data field that will indicate whether the transaction was a short sale or short sale exempt transaction. A short sale transaction is a transaction in which a seller sells a security which the seller does not own, or the seller has borrowed for its own account ( <E T="03">see</E> 17 CFR 242.200). A short sale exempt transaction is a short sale transaction that is exempt from the short sale price test restrictions of Regulation SHO Rule 201 ( <E T="03">see</E> 17 CFR 242.201(c)). </FTNT> <FTNT> <SU>12</SU>  “Exchange” is the market identifier (Z = BZX, Y = BYX, X = EDGX, A = EDGA). </FTNT> Cboe LiveVol, LLC (“LiveVol”), a wholly owned subsidiary of the Exchange's parent company, Cboe Global Markets, Inc., makes the Short Volume Report available for purchase to Users on the LiveVol DataShop website ( <E T="03">datashop.cboe.com</E> ). Both the end-of-day report and end-of-month report are included in the cost of the Short Volume Report and are available for purchase by both Members as well as non-Members on an annual or monthly  <SU>13</SU> <FTREF/> basis. The monthly fee is $750 per Internal Distributor  <SU>14</SU> <FTREF/> and $1,250 per External Distributor. <SU>15</SU> <FTREF/> Additionally, the Exchange offers historical reports containing both the end-of-day volume and end-of-month trading activity. The fee per month of historical data is $500. The Short Volume Report provided on a historical basis is only for display use redistribution ( <E T="03">e.g.,</E> the data may be provided on the User's platform). Therefore, Users of the historical data may not charge separately for data included in the Short Volume Report or incorporate such data into their product. The Exchange notes that the Short Volume Report is subject to direct competition from other exchanges, as other exchanges offer similar products for a fee. <SU>16</SU> <FTREF/> <FTNT> <SU>13</SU>  The monthly fees for the Report are assessed on a rolling period based on the original subscription date. For example, if a User subscribes to the Report on October 24, 2023, the monthly fee will cover the period of October 24, 2023, through November 23, 2023. If the User cancels its subscription prior to November 23, 2023, and no refund is issued, the User will continue to receive both the end-of-day and end-of-month components of the Report for the subscription period. </FTNT> <FTNT> <SU>14</SU>  An Internal Distributor of an Exchange Market Data product is a Distributor that receives the Exchange Market Data product and then distributes that data to one or more Users within the Distributor's own entity. <E T="03">See</E> Cboe EDGX U.S. Equities Exchange Fee Schedule. </FTNT> <FTNT> <SU>15</SU>  An External Distributor of an Exchange Market Data product is a Distributor that receives the Exchange Market Data product and then distributes that data to a third party or one or more Users outside the Distributor's own entity. <E T="03">See</E> Cboe EDGX U.S. Equities Exchange Fee Schedule. </FTNT> <FTNT> <SU>16</SU>   <E T="03">See</E> the Nasdaq Fee Schedule, Equity 7, Section 152. <E T="03">See also,</E> the TAQ Group Short Sales (Monthly File) and Short Volume product, offered by the New York Stock Exchange LLC (“NYSE”) and affiliated equity markets (the “NYSE Group”) at NYSE Exchange Proprietary Market Data | TAQ NYSE Group Short Sales. </FTNT> The Exchange proposes to provide a pricing incentive program in which qualifying academic purchasers may purchase the historical reports for the greater fee of (i) a 50% discount off of their total purchase of historical Short Volume Reports or (ii) $500. For example, if a qualifying academic purchaser purchases a month and a half of data, for a total cost of $750 before the discount (for what would be a discounted price of $375), they will be charged the greater fee of $500. <SU>17</SU> <FTREF/> The Exchange believes that academic institutions provide a valuable service for the Exchange in studying and promoting the equities market. Though academic institutions and researchers have a need for granular equities data sets, they do not trade upon the data for which they subscribe. The Exchange believes the proposed reduced fees for qualifying academic purchasers of historical Short Volume Reports will encourage and promote academic studies of its market data by academic institutions. In order to qualify for the academic pricing, an academic purchaser must be (1) an accredited academic institution, (2) that will use the data in independent academic research, academic journals and other publications, teaching and classroom use, or for other bona fide educational purposes ( <E T="03">i.e.</E> academic use). Furthermore, use of the data must be limited to faculty and students of the accredited academic institution, and any commercial or profit-seeking usage is excluded. Academic pricing will not be provided to any purchaser whose research is funded by a securities industry participant. The Exchange will have the discretion to review and approve such qualifying academic purchasers who submit a brief application in accordance with existing LiveVol subscriber policies and request additional information when it deems necessary. <FTNT> <SU>17</SU>  The Exchange proposes to amend its fee schedule to include this example for clarity as well. </FTNT> The Exchange notes that other exchanges currently offer academic discounts for similar data feeds. <SU>18</SU> <FTREF/> The Exchange recognizes the high value ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Preview showing 10k of 24k characters. Full document text is stored and available for version comparison. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━