Dec. 26, 2022
Dear Whomever this may concern at the SEC, I hope you all had a wonderful Holiday/Christmas weekend. As a retail investor, I cannot wait to see large scale reforms in market structure. I, like many others, have spent the past two years learning more about how genuinely broken our markets are due to conflict of interests between financial institutions and their monopolistic power to dictate price discovery. What is mind blowing is my background is in finance, I am still rooted somewhat in that world and have spent the last 8 years of my life dealing with massive data modeling for ad tech companies. The concepts I have learned in the past 2 years far exceed anything I collectively learned in college or in my first roles in finance regarding market structure. The fact you can sell something you don't have is fraud. Payment for Order Flow would be illegal in every other market/industry but for some reason it is the norm for retail investors in the US. We need to eliminate all of these vehicles of fraud and manipulation in our markets in order to restore trust. If we cannot start this path now, I will never trust US equity markets again for the rest of my life and will look elsewhere to invest. We need to ban dark pools, failure to deliver, payment for order flow, naked short selling, infinite liquidity, small fines for RICO levels of manipulation and crime, and develop a method for instant settlement. Prison should also be on the table for the large scale manipulators. The DOJ investigations into Racketeering with Archegos gives me hope that justice can prevail. The DTCC should also be audited at least on a yearly cadence. It is disturbing to the highest degree that financial institutions are able to collect money and sell something they do not possess, then also have the means to manipulate the market in their favor. I believe in you, Gary Gensler. You have won me over in my eyes. I know this battle will be difficult due to the parties that do not want this change have seemingly infinite resources but the fact that I believe you are attempting to root out the core rot of US markets, you have me on your side. This will be your legacy and may the strength of millions of American retail investors be by your side. Thank you, Cory