The SEC’s state-of-the-art market monitoring system is fully operational after 14 years — just in time for legal challenges to kill it.

Sherwood News – In an extensive write up about the Consolidated Audit Trail and congressional efforts to tear it down, HMA President & CEO Tyler Gellasch is quoted saying “When the CAT came online, regulators and brokers stopped using OATS, the decades old reporting and surveillance regime,” said Tyler Gellasch, CEO of the Healthy Markets Association, a non-profit focused on increasing transparency and reducing conflicts of interest in the capital markets. He added: “There is no substitute or backup for the CAT.” Gellasch said he’s concerned. If the CAT were to be abolished by the courts, there would be substantial barriers to simply returning to the former system of market data collection. Trying to bring back OATS to replace the CAT would require years of technology upgrades and extensive industry testing, as well as several more legal filings, all of which could be themselves challenged in court, Gellasch said. The elimination of the CAT would leave the capital markets exposed to significant abuse, Gellasch wrote in a letter to the SEC this month, “and regulators without any effective tools to protect them. “Nobody can just turn the old tools back on.” (FULL STORY).