Mar. 12, 2023
To the SEC Every rule the SEC passes is only as good as the enforcement that backs it. I want to see higher fines that actually serve as a significant deterrent. I think some broker-dealers should lose their licenses instead of receiving fines that amount to nothing more than a cost of doing business - a cost that is often outweighed by the ill-gotten gains obtained through “honest mistakes”. I fully support the rule, please implement it as soon as possible. A broker routing orders first to a wholesaler, who then passes them to the auction, which might route it back to the wholesaler, seems unnecessarily complex and also grants the wholesaler a profound information advantage against other market participants: they get to see orders well before anyone else. The Commission should address this unfair information advantage by having brokers first route to the auction and specify where the order should go if the auction is unsuccessful. That way the entire market has equal knowledge. The current rule forces dark pools (Alternative Trading Systems) to provide quotes and trades to consolidated market data IF they wish to operate as an auction. I fully support and appreciate rule changes like this that bring more transparency to dark markets. The investing public should have easy access to what is happening within the markets. Monopolies are bad, and there is clear monopolistic behavior here. The Commission notes that 90% of marketable orders of individual investors in NMS stocks to a small group of six off-exchange dealers, and 66% is captured by just two firms. Those figures will be even higher for specific stocks. The state of American markets is clearly anti-competitive and that needs to change. I would gladly pay commission to avoid being routed through a wholesaler, especially one with a long record of flouting the law like Citadel Securities Sincerely Anthony Toliver