Traders Magazine – In a story about the Securities and Exchange Commissions proposal to provide modest reforms to market data infastructure, Healthy Markets Executive Director Tyler Gellasch is quoted saying “As it stands, the SEC proposal solidifies the advantage of the exchanges’ proprietary feeds over SIPs, by explicitly allowing a latency advantage to the former. And by failing to set minimum data quality standards for competing SIPs from new providers, there is an increased risk of investor harm, for example if a broker deliberately choses an inferior feed when benchmarking executions for investors. The SEC has sat by for decades letting exchanges charge ever-increasing fees for market data, then use those revenues to subsidise trading. Exchanges are now dependent on that model to compete for order flow, and both parts – the data and the trading fees – give rise to significant market distortions, and discriminate against smaller traders. The question is whether the SEC has the political will to challenge exchanges’ data revenues and the wherewithal to withstand the pushback from exchanges when it comes.” (Full Story).
Reader Interactions