December 13, 2015
As technical staff for two Financial Extranet Service Providers since 1999 I have been dismayed to see the casual march of unfair and sharp practice in the Financial Industry over the last few years. IEX is one of the few stories of honest men beating stacked odds in the Financial Industry. Although I deal only with data delivery one cannot help but notice the obsession with infinitesimal amounts of time and latency across the industry. There is a culture of frankly legal cheating so competitive now we frequently have to explain that the speed of light is indeed an insurmountable barrier. Fairness and ethics being long left behind now the bounds of reality itself are cause for outrage - please keep that in mind when hearing IEX's detractors. These are not balanced characters when it comes to their business.
Not only is IEX's 350ms deliberate delay an important step back towards introducing some concept of fair dealing into a morally corrosive environment it is a step however small back towards sanity.
Indeed if anything comes out of these hearings Gentlemen and Ladies is that you have the beginnings of true benchmarks for regulation.
Please consider this in your deliberations.