June 15, 2021
To whom this may concern,
I have been investing in equities for about 15 years. I am referred to as a retail investor. The retail investors have been taken advantage of by institutional investors for years. I saw this firsthand when I watched the CEO of Robinhood, Vlad Tenev, and CEO of Citadel, Kenneth C. Griffin testify before Congress. As an investor, it was discouraging for me that Mr. Tenev did not allow investors to buy GameStop on January 28th, 2021 and only allowed sells. What further annoyed me was that hedge funds were able to use this information to place short positions and reap further benefits of this debacle. That is irresponsible for a brokerage house to do something like that and this action hurt many retail investors financially.
The main takeaway from the Robinhood hearings was the issue related to settlement times. We are currently in a T-2 settlement world. We used to be in a T-8 settlement world and technology has taken us down to T-2 which is great. It seems that there is still room for us to go to T-0. If we had T-0 settles this would have never happened I think that it is essential for the evolution of financial systems to go to a T-0 system. We have the technology to do this and this will eliminate this huge risk that we face as retail investors. Investors should not have to wait 2 days to wait for their trades to clear when we have the technology to do T-0 transactions today.
It would be extremely beneficial to the financial system to approve BSTX. This would allow many assets to trade at T-0 settles and create a more even playing field for retail investors. After seeing the events that took place with Robinhood and Citadel earlier this year, there has not been a better time to take action to help our financial system. We have the technology and we should use it to mitigate this systemic risk in the future. Thank you for your time.