Oct. 31, 2022
October 31, 2022 First, I would like to state clearly I support the general sentiment behind the proposed rule, and I greatly appreciate the effort behind its creation and proposal. I feel it falls short in its intended goals due to oversight of the retail investor needs to make informed decisions and protect themselves from risks created by the current opaque lending practices, which is rather disconcerting. What makes this very worrying to me is you reference important testimony and tools in your \"Executive Summary\" section then seemingly ignore elaborating on why they were so important as to be mentioned in the front-end of the proposal. If I only read the Executive Summary I'd leave with the opinion: \"they're listening to the right people like Dennis Kelleher, using Michael Blaugrund's very useful testimony from only 50 days after the highly retail investor-interested event which called for his testimony and even bringing up the couple of tools meant to help give insight to investors but that absolutely don't, probably due to the struggle incurred attempting to pull any meaningful data from them\". Even if I were to read the \"Intended Objectives\" section I'd still be left with this sense of ordinary investors being considered in the creation of this proposal. After reading more, I feel you managed to lose a bit of the very plot you'd set forth in the aforementioned sections of the proposed rule and left folks (including yourselves) out to dry. Here's why: 1) you manage to take the idea of consolidation (first mentioned in the proposal, appearing directly after said reference to Michael Blaugrund's testimony which was heard alongside testimony calling for a \"consolidated tape\") and turn it in to a product with a price tag purchasable only by those qualified as a \"competing consolidator\". How about asking for all participating parties identified as needing lending information from, since they see such a benefit in lending, to chip in for servers maintained by the SEC where the data can be dumped to instead in order to offset the effect of said identified parties using people's investments as the very means to devalue said investments (not to mention the profit they get from doing this and the risk they shift to retail investors when things goes bust). Raw, anonymous data is what we need access to if they need to rely on lending shares so badly. 2) you show the N-CEN form as useful and nothing but. I want to be clear here: I don't disagree or refute the numbers you came up with for the proposed rule nor how you're using them (in fact I'm impressed you found use from the filings), but do you not think it should be noted that the selectively limited sections of the N-CEN (Item C.16 and Item C.17, limited to 10 each) on a yearly filing that's allowed to be filed 75 days after fiscal year-end isn't helping create clear, comprehensive oversight? #1# How there's very little within an N-CEN filing, whether attempting to compare against corresponding N-PORT filings or not, that allow for the production of actionable intel, or insight into the market, for an investor? You can use these shortcomings as very real reasons as to why you're calling for proposed changes. If you disagree with my sentiment (and the next one I'm going to express about the N-PORT form), then I suggest rather than wasting taxpayer money on making Game-Show them ed campaigns aimed at children not old enough to invest you spend the money making coherent white-papers on how exactly one (e.g. yourself) can take data found in these forms and convert it into something that then helps inform a decision involving risk or give insight into the state of the market (taking role-call like you did with the N-CEN filings obviously doesn't need explained as the technical specifications tackles that). Next, you reference the N-PORT form as well in the \"Executive Summary\" section as a mechanism for gaining some insight into lending activity, which is the only other filing which investors have to work with in terms of security lending data other than lenders announcing how much of a security they have to be lent out. Again, the problem here is you completely fail to mention how useless this data is in risk assessment/prevention and investor protection. The N-PORT form can be reported up to 60 days after the quarter end-date for which it's reporting on, meaning the first month within the report can be 5 months old before you even see it. #2# Also, can you even track N-PORT filings in a useful way with the loose standards? You allow participants to submit various identifiers appearing in different fields (e.g. \"Inhouse Asset ID\