Tag: payment for order flow

Jon Stewart interviews SEC Chair Gary Gensler—an acronym bonanza?

Here’s an unexpected pair: Jon Stewart interviewing SEC Chair Gary Gensler on his podcast, The Problem with Jon Stewart. In many ways, the interview was remarkably financially sophisticated, with acronyms like “PFOF” tossed around pretty casually, not to mention “naked shorts,” “best execution,” “dark pools” and “lit markets.”  Somebody definitely did his homework.

SEC Chair testifies before House Committee on Financial Services—climate, human capital and cybersecurity disclosure proposals likely delayed

On Tuesday, SEC Chair Gary Gensler testified for over four hours (without a break!) before the thousands (it seemed) of members of the House Committee on Financial Services.  His formal testimony covered a number of topics on the SEC’s agenda that Gensler (and others) have addressed numerous times in past: market structure and equity markets, predictive analytics, crypto, issuer disclosure, China, SPACs and Rule 10b5-1 plans and was remarkably similar to his formal testimony in September before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs.  (See, e.g., this PubCo post and this PubCo post.) If you followed any of the coverage of Gensler’s testimony before the Senate committee (see this PubCo post), there was a Groundhog-Day feel to much of the questioning, but the five-minute limitation on questioning (because there are thousands of House committee members) did not really offer much opportunity for in-depth conversation about anything.   

Gensler also wants to “freshen up” equity market rules

Not only does he want to “freshen up” Rule 10b5-1 (see this PubCo post), SEC Chair Gary Gensler has the same prescription for the rules governing the equity markets. In remarks yesterday at the Global Exchange and FinTech Conference, Gensler observed that “technology has changed how market makers interact, how trading platforms compete, how investors access those markets, and the economic incentives amongst these various market participants.” For example, a few years ago, retail investors weren’t even trading on commission-free brokerage apps. But the rules governing markets were “mostly adopted 16 years ago” and “do not fully reflect today’s technology.” Gensler believes that “it’s appropriate to look at ways to freshen up the SEC’s rules to ensure that our equity markets reflect our mission: to maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets, while ensuring we protect investors and facilitate capital formation.” Gensler focused his remarks on segmentation and concentration in the equity markets, as well as two fairly recent developments: the rise of payment for order flow (and the related issue of best execution) and gamification. This is clearly an area in Gensler’s sweet spot—having conducted research and taught classes on the intersection of finance and technology—and his remarks were of interest even for those of us who do not typically focus on market structure issues.