Mar. 12, 2023
Good morning, The SEC exists to ensure fair markets for all investors through enforcement means that are severe enough to actually be a deterrent to the broker-dealers. Fines cannot be seen as a simple cost of doing business. I fully support the subject line rule, please implement 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. 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. The investing public should have easy access to what is happening within the markets. 15 U.S.C. 78k-1 (“section 11A”) states that "It is in the public interest and appropriate for the protection of investors and the maintenance of fair and orderly markets to assure ... fair competition among brokers and dealers, among exchange markets, and between exchange markets and markets other than exchange markets." 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. There are clearly some market participants benefitting from a dominant, anti-competitive position in the marketplace. They pay for order flow or secure it through backroom deals. Why can't orders compete in lit markets? RS, Concerned Household Investor