December 27, 2015
Dear Commission
The overwhelming support for the IEX Exchange is now clear. The entire world is now waiting and watching to see whose side the leading U.S. securities and exchange regulatory body will come down on.
Will it confirm the suspicions of many in the investment community that the SEC is nothing but a creature of the very companies it is tasked with regulating and use its powers to protect the advantages given to a handful of traders with speed advantages over all other participants?
Or will it favor the path laid out by its own EXISTING rules and regulations as they pertain to protecting and serving longer term investors - who make up the majority of participants in our markets?
By allowing IEX to offer a new Exchange, you are allowing investors the option to avoid being taken advantage of by high frequency speed traders who serve little to no function in our markets other than impose a tax on all equity transactions.
You are giving them the ability to steer clear of environments where their orders are specifically targeted for unfair practices that are used by high frequency speed traders to capture risk free latency arbitrage opportunities.
One of the great failures of our market regulatory bodies over the past ten years is that they have allowed the very structure of our markets to be infiltrated by this small group of speeed traders.
Through their lobbying efforts, payments to academics, political donations and public misinformation campaigns they have sought to create a picture of their activities as beneficial.
The truth however is that it is only beneficial to one small group: them.
Everyone else participating in our markets has instead paid a price in the form of poor execution quality, gaming of orders through internalization and fragile market structure (liquidity vacuums) in times of high volatility.
Ask yourselves, prior to the infiltration of high frequency trading into our markets, how many flash crashes were there? How about after? These traders and their algorithms are the very reasons for these market structure failures.
Along with the many, many others who have voiced their support for a new, better alternative, I fully support the IEX exchange approval.
Not only is the structural integrity of our markets at stake, but also the integrity of the SEC itself in standing behind its own rules and regulations.
The Commission has already spoken and stated that when all things are considered, it is the interests of longer term investors that matter most and not those of a small group of participants who take virtually zero risk and only take from other participants without contributing any necessary or beneficial function in return.
The time is now. Approve IEX.