Contributor: Ralston Roberts Jr

There is a distinct irony in regulators pushing for speed bumps in US equities markets after we’ve spent the last decade to make the national market system faster. Increasingly, when it comes to the efficiency of US equities markets, it’s safe to say that we should be careful for what we wish for. You might even argue that we did the job too well. American equities markets have been through a succession of gyrations—decimalization, Nasdaq’s SuperMontage order entry and execution platform, and the RegNMS reforms that brought the trade-through, access and sub-penny rules. The push for uber-efficiency has continued with new rules governing the activities of “large traders,” FINRA’s expansion of the order recording and reporting obligations for OATS to include orders in all NMS stocks, and an effort to limit the use of IOIs in dark pools.... read more