May 5, 2009
More and more pension plans are put in the hands of individual investors since the demise of defined benefits plans and increase of the use of many types of retirement investment vehicles. They are increasingly making their own investment decisions in a playground dominated by hedge funds, mutual funds, and other institutional investors that manipulated the stability of the equity market in order to give them an upper hand by scaring out the small guy. The uptick rule which had been in place for many years maintained the stability of the equity markets for that period. It is only during the period that you studied, 2005, which was the middle of a strong bull market did it make little difference. At that time, cartoonists showed that taking darts and throwing them at stocks just as easily assured an increase as the average mutual fund. The market fluctuations down were minimal and not a reflection of the stock market if studied over a larger time period. It even appears to the average investor that the SEC is in the hands of hedge funds,mutual funds, and institutional investor by the small limited time period reviewed. At least with the uptick rule, there was the illusion that the market was not going to be overtly manipulated by the hedge funds and large institutional investors. It was the elimination of the uptick rule or shall we say the "deregulation" of this phase of the equity market that caused millions of small investors to be scared out investing, after taking a financial bath from the institutional selling of the equities future of America. Financial investments should be just that, careful evaluations of the books of a company, feeling about the management, and future for the company not the gambling of the large at the expense of the few. Please return the uptick rule in full, not temporarily or as a circuit breaker.