The SEC wants to save the little guy. Again.
A number of you alert readers sent me this story (WSJ registration required but there are similar versions) about the Gensler SEC weighing changes to how trades from retail brokerages are handled.
For those new to market structure, the SEC has a long history of adding complexity to the stock market in the name of helping retail money that ends up instead aiding computerized traders and stock exchanges.
Would that we had less noise and more substance! But we need to first understand the problem. It’s that the stock market is full of tiny trades, and not that retail traders are getting hurt.
Meanwhile, this photo is not of market structure. Normally in early June – for the bulk of my adult life – I’d be at the NIRI Annual Conference circulating with colleagues.
I’d have to count to know for sure, but for most of the past 27 years I’ve been there. We took a break and this year we’re in Jackson Hole, WY, and other spots in a big loop through WY and MT seeing the west (I’m writing Tuesday night in Billings).
We were in Yellowstone much of Monday covering more than ten miles afoot, riveted by the constancy of change in nature. Some of it is predictable, like Old Faithful and the Grand Geyser (footage here).
A lot of it isn’t. And you can’t manage it or direct it.
The point?
Stuff constantly changes. It’s the most inerrant feature of nature. Change is integral to human nature, which animates the stock market.
Regulators are possessed of that same nature yet want to cast the market like pewter. Create a model and force every free-moving thing to conform.
It’s most certainly not that SEC chair Gary Gensler is smarter than millions of self-interested participants. No, regulators want to make a mark, the same as anybody else.
Pharaohs in Egypt hoped for immortality through pyramids. Carnegie built libraries. You can go to Newport and see the edifices of the rich, built to last long beyond the builders.
As ever, I have a point about the stock market. The preceding SEC administration under Jay Clayton revamped the rules, too.
I discussed their final proposed rule, Regulation National Market System II – which I called Reg Nemesis II (see what I wrote about Reg Nemesis I here) – with SEC head of Trading and Markets Brett Redfearn, who described it to the NIRI board at our request.
That rule considered many of the same things Gensler is weighing including redefining the meaning of “round lot,” currently 100 shares regardless of price, to reduce market-fragmentation that harms investors of all kinds.
After all that work, the expended taxpayer resources, the studies and lawsuits and machination, it’s set aside because the new SEC wants to build its own pyramids.
Okay, Quast, you’ve convinced me everybody wants an ovation. Your point?
The problem is the stock market is stuffed full of tiny trades that devolve purpose from investment to chasing pennies and generating data to sell.
Which in turn is the consequence of rules. I’ve explained before that the SEC’s paramount objective is 100 shares of everything to buy and sell, all the time.
Which is impossible.
I know. I trade. Trades fragment more at exchanges than in broker-operated markets called dark pools. Routinely I buy in a chunk in a dark pool and then watch my trades get splintered into 5, 7, 34, 61, shares at exchanges (especially the NYSE).
The exchanges pay traders to set the bid and offer, which snap at my order like piranhas, chopping it into pieces and pricing the market with it.
In Yellowstone, nature takes its course. It’s a marvel, cinematic artistry that takes one’s breath away. It cannot be and does not need to be directed by humans. We observe it and love it, and it changes. Some stuff like the Grand Geyser and Old Faithful, follow a clock. A lot of things don’t.
The same is true of human commerce. The more the few machinate interaction into exceptions and directives and objectives, the less it works. It should in large part follow its own course, with a clear boardwalk for traipsing through the geysers.
Put another way, rather than merchandising retail trades to build pyramids, we should insist on a single set of standards, no exceptions. And let the game be played.
There are too many complex rules, too many exceptions. That’s the real problem. And so the market lacks the elegance of chance, the beauty of organic and constant change.