So the fact that we are a full-service firm that provides two-sided prices in all of those products. The fact that we now have a global offering with a credible desk in Europe for the first time is important. The fact that we have the same thing in Asia is important. We’re not nearly as scale to some of our competitors. We don’t have dozens and dozens of salespeople on the street. We don’t have 20 years of relationships in Europe but we do have thanks to the ITG and the old legacy Knight franchises. We do have a significant amount of customer relationships. We are obviously leveraging the old ITG infrastructure in terms of customer relationships in Europe and in Asia in particular which has been incredibly helpful. So we do have a built-in sales force.
And we do have great partners in Bloomberg and MarketAxess and others that provide RFQ capability so that we can be competitive. And just about every counterparty will enable Virtu and give us a shot, because we have a pretty good brand name in terms of customer service and whatnot. So if you add up A plus B plus C, we have a scaled credible global offering that allow us to be competitive. Certainly in the quarter there was more portfolio shifting and the people were moving out from fixed income to hear some people wanting to get two-way prices in large block. Bitcoin, ETFs. So there were definitely some episodic transitions if you will that were very helpful to the results. But that’s what the business is for. And hopefully you get a couple or three of those or 10 of those a quarter and that repeats itself.
So again it’s one of these businesses and our growth initiatives where we have spent a lot of time, a lot of money and a lot of resources to build the technological infrastructure to be responsive. We understand the products very well. We’re a fully integrated firm so we’re able to provide tight prices because the ETF desk is not an island unto itself. It’s working with the entire firm. We’re internalizing the flows that we get with the non-customer market making depths around the firm. There’s one P&L in this firm. So we’re very, very efficient in doing that. And we made a conscious decision three or four years ago to dip our toes and now we’ve got both feet in the fixed income waters, which gives us we’ve got true scale and global capabilities.
And then as I said we’ve made significant investments and hires in Europe and in Asia to give us a global presence. So we’re a long ways away from being one of the larger name players like Flow Traders or Citadel some of these other firms that have much larger infrastructure and they’re great firms and they’re great competitors. We think we there’s a value that we can add. We think we have attractive two-way prices. We think we have operational excellence. And most importantly thanks to the legacy ITG and the Knight businesses we have a very, very credible brand name and a very credible global network of clients that will do business with us. So all of those accrue among lead to our ability to have a truly scaled global block business in a Virtu style, which means our headcount is going to be a fraction of what the competitors are going to be.
Our capital base is going to be smaller than some of our competitors. We’re going to take less fresh than some of our competitors. But at the end of the day there is a role for us in that marketplace and I’m very, very happy with the results we had this quarter. And indeed I’ve been very happy with the results we’ve had over the last three years. This quarter in particular was a standout ones for that group.
Chris Allen: Appreciate all the color there. And just a follow-up on that business. Is there a good indicator for us to look at here? Is it ETF flows from a fixed equity perspective ETF trading activity? Or is it because of the block nature is it something that will just have to attempt to triangulate off of different things?
Joseph Molluso: Yeah. I mean, obviously, overall ETF volumes are a good thing to look at globally. I mean, it is a little bit lumpy, because within that you’ll see, there’ll be huge blocks that come through periodically. And obviously, there’s risk associated with those but there’s more reward associated with those. So, certainly we have clients that are sending in smaller clips and that will be done through the RFQ. If it’s a larger block of a transition of an RIA, we may be putting competition with two or three other market makers and we try to price that as tightly as we possibly can. A lot of folks will do that once a year, sometimes they’ll do that four times a year. And the key is to provide really good customer service, so that you’re in the wheel and you could be competitive.
I mean no one is coming to us, because we’re Virtu and they happen to think we’re good guys, they’re coming to us because we provide really, really good tight pricing with immediacy if need be and good customer service. And not only that we can provide, because of our analytics business a real pre and post-trade analysis, so that they can satisfy themselves in their own best execution committees that they’ve done the right thing by their investors in terms of allocating assets from asset class A to asset class B, both expressed as ETFs if that makes sense.
Chris Allen: Yes. Thanks guys.
Joseph Molluso: Thank you.
Douglas Cifu: Thanks.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Craig Siegenthaler with Bank of America. Your line is open.
Craig Siegenthaler: Hey. Good morning, Doug. So, it’s hard for me to congratulate you on the Panthers win last night, because I’m sadly a Flyers fan.
Douglas Cifu: Well, we all have our crosses to bear.
Craig Siegenthaler: Well, back to business here. We’re hoping you could spend a little more time on the effective spreads. So you could see this developing in the 605 data in Jan and Feb. I was hoping you could walk us through the underlying factors that drove this especially with realized volatility lower?
