Apr. 20, 2022
As a retail investor I am highly dissatisfied by the content of this proposed rule that would allow for FTDs (Failure To Deliver) to continue, which could be abused by market makers and used in conjunction with illegal naked shorting and abusive dark pool trade routing, controlling and suppressing the prices on security trading. This does not in any way benefit investors and in fact could be extremely harmful, which is anathema to the entire purpose of the SECs very existence. Please do not allow SFTs (Security Financial Transactions) proposed in this rule, to create new and potentially endless layers of "can-kicking" to be allowed, whereby the very real financial obligations of the FTDs get passed along instead of settled. I understand that this may provide stability at this moment, but it also condones abusive practices where market makers are never accountable for their failings. This is not acceptable and creates an opportunity to harm retail investors while violating our rights to a free and fair market. The manipulation needs to come to an end. Please remove this proposed rule and furthermore please do not try to propose something similar again in the future, as iterations of this have been rejected in the past and continue to be rejected by educated investors as they resurface. The mission of the SEC is to look out for the well-being of investors like myself, so I would propose that attention be directed in doing so. This would best be accomplished by banning Payment For Order Flow which is inherently harmful to retail investors and unfairly benefits Market Makers and brokers who do not have investors best interests in mind. Another worthy target for your attention would be to shut down the abusive use of dark pools by market makers such as Citadel which has been used to undermine the true value of securities traded by retail investors and to suppress price discovery. Thank you in advance for your timely attention to this matter, and I hope you are able to uphold your obligations to help investors by eliminating predatory behavior from financial institutions. Sincerely, Joshua Hughes