December 18, 2015
Your decision on the IEX application to become an exchange is a litmus test for the SEC and for the administration more generally. The administration has a record of appointing pseudo-regulators to regulatory agencies and the SEC has a record of being in bed with high-frequency traders and refusing to enforce the provision of Regulation NMS that the HFTs regularly flout. The existing exchanges have created a wide variety of order types that my wife and I, as retail investors, do not have access to. These order types are intended to enable and do enable massive spoofing of orders, latency arbitrage, and front-running of orders from legitimate long-term investors, those of us who should be the real function of the equity markets, as opposed to the rent-seekers in the HFT "community.
The SEC should accept the IEX application and should move to eliminate the abusive order types that cater to HFT traders.