Insights

Business Insider: There’s a New ‘Hot-Button’ Issue on Wall Street, and Battle Lines are Being Drawn

Business Insider reporter Matt Turner writes:

"Information wants to be free," the technology activist Steward Brand once said. "Information also wants to be expensive."

That is proving true on Wall Street, where stock exchanges - in particular the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq - both publicly traded and for-profit, stand accused by rivals and some users of unfairly increasing the price of market data. 

The debate centers on whether that data is essential - some customers and rivals say it is, the exchanges say otherwise - and whether there is any competition in the market for that data...

... "My take is that there have been some abusive practices - the flucation, the aribitrariness with which fees have been jacked up, and the monopolistic power that goes behind it - there is a problem," Dan Gallagher, an SEC Commissioner until 2015 who is now president of the consultant Patomak Global Partners, told Business Insider.

Global Regulatory Standardization: A Critical View

Regulatory harmonization sounds like a noble goal. But instead of facilitating cooperation among regulators from different jurisdictions, it has morphed into the imposition of one-size-fits-all regulatory standards.

Wall Street Journal opinion piece: Equities Policy Needs Surgery, Not Band-Aids

Volatilty, flash-crash risks and bigger dark pools are the legacy of the SEC's Regulation NMS.
By Paul Atkins

IEX, the self-declared anti-high-frequency trading venue praised in Michael Lewis's 2014 book, "Flash Boys," has filed an application with the Securities and Exchange Commission to change from a "dark pool" to a full-fledged stock exchange. Good news, one might think. But in so doing, IEX has exposed the regulatory quagmire harming the U.S. securities markets.