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Last Friday, the SEC’s Market Structure Subcommittee released its draft recommendation on decimalization and tick sizes. In a refreshingly clear analysis, it recommended that the SEC not experiment with artificially increasing the tick sizes for small-cap companies.

“Engaging in pilot programs, when we know what occurs from prior experience (and it is not good for investors) seems unjustifiable.

The basic question at issue is whether increasing tick sizes of small-cap stocks to a nickel (or more) will help

The buyside has many interrelated concerns around the US equity market structure: high frequency trading, latency advantages, complex exchange order types, brittleness in the market resulting in “mini flash-crashes,” the sequestration of liquidity in darkpools, and the maker-taker model, among others. But one area that touches each of these but receives little attention is the role of the broker.

The buyside interacts with the market using brokers as their agents. When a buyside trader hands an order to a broker’s

The SEC has mandated a massive project to build the consolidated audit trail (CAT) over the next several years, at a cost that’s projected to reach the hundreds of millions of dollars that will ultimately be borne by investors. But there has so far been a disturbing lack of attention to how this massive database is supposed to be used from a technical perspective. As a result, it looks likely that the CAT will be