Mar. 18, 2023
March 18, 2023 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. COMPETITION IS GOOD 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.\" For too long the Commission has not be enduring fair competition, especially within the off-exchange systems that currently dominate. It's good to see they are beginning to take their mandate more seriously. 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. Sincerely, A Household Investor