Bats Global Markets has priced its initial public offering at $19 per share, Business Insider has confirmed.It's set to raise about $253 million, making it the largest IPO of the year.Bats ' a stock-exchange operator giving the NYSE and Nasdaq a run for their money ' is set to begin trading on Friday morning on its own Bats BZX Exchange.Shares were expected to price between $17 and $19.Bats is thesecond-largest stock-exchange operator in the US, after the NYSE. Itholds a 21.1% share of the US equities market, ahead of Nasdaq's 18.8%, according to an investor presentation.It operates the largest exchange-traded fund market in the world, with a26.8% share of that market, ahead of Nasdaq and the NYSE, according to the presentation.Bats also operates the largest exchange in Europe ' larger than the Deutsche Borse and the London Stock Exchange.The Bats deal ' which will be listed on one of Bats' own exchanges, the BZX, under the symbol "BATS" ' is actually the company's second attempt at going public.In 2012, Bats had to withdraw its first IPO attemptafter its computersmalfunctioned and kept its stock from trading. They also forced a circuit breakerin Apple's stock that day.But thingsare expected to go a lot more smoothly this time.Bats has listed 70 ETFs on its exchanges since then, and performs auctions daily in each of those securities. It had listed only nine at the time of the first attempt.It has also run more than 50,000 tests of the corporate-auction mechanism in recent months, according to someone who attended theBats roadshow presentation, and has tested the system up to nearly as much as three times the auction volume of Facebook's IPO, the largest in history.Last quarter, IPO activity hititslowest level since the first quarter of 2009.There werejust nine IPOs in the US throughout the quarter, raising a total of $1.2 billion, according to Dealogic. That's down from 33 deals worth $5.5 billion in the same period last year and 59 deals worth $10.1 billion in the same period in 2014.Morgan Stanley and Citigroup are the lead underwriters on the Bats offering. Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and a handful of other firms are also working on the deal.SEE ALSO:5 top Wall Street bankers explain why the IPO market has dried up ' and when things will pick up againJoin the conversation about this storyNOW WATCH: Markets sell off again ' US equities down 10% over 5 days
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