Apr. 20, 2022
Hello! I am a retail investor in Los Alamitos, California that currently invests in a wide variety of stocks for companies that I think are likely to succeed. I have a small range of investments, with the majority being responsible investing in broad market ETFs and funds offered by my 401k, but a smaller portion are in riskier investments. The only situation that a “Fire Sale Risk” would occur is if someone is performing extremely risky short investments. There is no way a fire sale risk would hurt the average retail investor, since most puts/shorts are held by investment gambling communities, and large institutions. In a truly free market, although it is a harsh opinion, if their incredibly risky position is threatened, they would be required to deal with the natural fallout of their actions and have losses in their bad investment position. Investments are not risk free, and bad investments exist all the time. Every “Fail to Deliver” is a theft to retail. This rule proposal encourages large institutions to take risky positions that are likely to suffer from large amounts of FTDs, thus this rule change is encouraging large institutions to steal from retail. Markets are already inherently biased against retail investors, since they can’t participate in after hours trading, and T+2 isn’t reduced to T+0 yet. SR-NSCC-2022-003 would make this bias worse. Please do not let this rule pass. Thanks for taking the time to read this comment on this proposal! -Kyle Wadsworth