Oct. 08, 2022
October 8, 2022
I support transaction-by-transaction reporting because all investors should have access to the same information when making investing decisions. No investor or group of investors should be able to hide their trading activity in aggregate data. The market needs this transparency to ensure it is not being manipulated by those who would turn it into an interface solely for that purpose.
For similar reasons I support the 15-minute reporting requirement No investor or group of investors should be allowed to hide questionable or even illegal trading practices and outright fraud between inexcusably long reporting windows. We need all market participants to be compliant with the rules of the market not merely achieving the APPEARANCE of compliance within certain timeframes. These hedge-funds with the market-makers they own (and the inherent conflicts of interest that entails) are able to purchases order flow information on retail trades and then use High Frequency Trading to manipulate the market at their will if they are able to achieve to create means of High Frequency Trading they are more than capable of achieving a means of High Frequency reporting.
Investment groups should not be the gatekeepers of success for publicly traded companies. Whether a publicly traded company fails or succeeds should be determined solely by that company's business practices and their ability to attract investors and hold its place in the market it should have nothing to do with whether some investment group sees it as an attractive target for price manipulation or liquidation. We strive for a FREE market, not a market that is RULED by those who have set themselves up as KINGS over it through inequitable and illegal means that the current (clearly inadequate) reporting requirements have allowed them to hide.
Retail investors will benefit from increased transparency. We have a much better idea of the risks of our decisions and transactions if we can see who is targeted which companies. If funds are allowed to short in the dark, retail investors remain dangerously unaware of the risks they take on when purchasing securities.
I believe in the new and very desirable phenomenon of the public serving as first-line watchdogs in monitoring short selling data for securities fraud, strengthening the SEC and better enabling it to fulfill its mandate, at no cost.
There are dangers inherent in long, untracked lending chains, and that can lead to economic fragility. Securities lending activity can hide massively destructive chains of obligation that can even be a threat to national security, and so transparency in this area is more important than it has ever been.