December 20, 2013
I think there should be a licensing hearing on these fees from all participants justifying why there are any pricing tiers whatsoever.
Participants assume that investors benefit by lower prices by allowing volume trading activity. I disagree. This enables price improvements of 0.0001 to jump queues and enables professional traders to take $ from investors in stock prices. Investors would rather pay a higher commission so that the markets reflect a market price, rather than daytrading noise or the artificial prices/stock IOUs from shortselling.
Further, by structuring their website to separate proposals of all of the exchanges and participants, the SEC appears to promote the idea that all of the trading mechanisms are separate. Many of these proposals are pieces of the current market structure, which does not work in the interest of the capital markets or investors. There are several terrible practices that have been agreed to by the SEC that harm investors, such as non-displayed orders, hundreds of order types, failure to identify trades as long or short in the FINRA daily short report, locating shares instead of borrowing shares, paying participants to trade against the investors. By arranging these proposals in this manner, the SEC avoids addressing the disadvantage to the retail investor and everyone can pretend that the capital markets function for the good of the community.