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The SEC's response to the 'meme stock' rally

84 points by slowhand09 4y ago

ratsmack 4y ago
It seems that the retail traders are doing better than the institutional types, so the "fix" is to hamstring the retail folks to maintain the status-quo, and make it look like they're doing a favor for retail by acting deeply concerned.
- Victerius 4y ago
  That's a childish take. Here's what the article says are the SEC's actual concerns: Gary Gensler, the SEC chief, has criticized payment for order flow (PFOF), a practice in which some commission-free brokers generate revenue by sending customer orders to wholesale market makers in return for payments, rather than to exchanges. He has said a ban on the practice is not off the table as it raises potential conflicts of interest, giving brokers incentives to encourage customers to trade more frequently to maximize the payments. The meme stock trading frenzy exposed concerns about the ways in which PFOF increases complexity and potential fragility in the securities markets, the House Financial Services Committee report said. Proponents say PFOF is a major reason brokerages were able to stop charging trading commissions, and retail investors often get a lower, better price than they would on the main exchange. Gensler has criticized the "gamification of trading" in which commission-free brokerages encourage excessive trading using lights, noises, notifications and other gimmicks to generate more PFOF. He has also highlighted the use of artificial intelligence, predictive data analytics and machine learning to push products. In August 2021, the SEC issued a consultation on potential new rules to limit gamification and other "digital engagement prompts." The agency is expected to proceed with a rule change in the coming months. read more The U.S. House Financial Services Committee on Friday urged Congress to adopt legislation mandating the SEC study how its rules need to change to address new technological developments, such as digital engagement practices and social media-driven market activity. The GameStop saga highlighted the small number of market-makers -- brokers that execute trades and publicly post buy and sell quotes for others to trade -- that dominate the retail market, which may pose competition issues, Gensler has said. The House Financial Services Committee said that at the time of the Reddit rally, Robinhood was not connected to any exchanges, and of the six market makers Robinhood routed all its customers' orders to, nearly all were unable to execute trades in certain meme stocks due to the market stress. "Had all these market makers been unable to execute trades, Robinhood would have been unable to execute trades on behalf of its customers," the report said. Nearly all retail trades are executed away from exchanges. That is partly due to rules that allow market makers to offer fractional sub-penny price improvement on bids and offers, whereas exchanges have to quote in pennies. Gensler has said that has created an uneven playing field in the competition for retail orders. _______ As an aside, institutional investors, like pension funds, are not trying to generate +500% returns on options or meme stocks. They're not trying to beat traders. They're more comfortable with stable rates of return over the long term. +2%-3% per year. Not hard to beat for a day trader.
  - Animats 4y ago
    The House Financial Services Committee said that at the time of the Reddit rally, Robinhood was not connected to any exchanges, and of the six market makers Robinhood routed all its customers' orders to, nearly all were unable to execute trades in certain meme stocks due to the market stress. Had Robinhood had actual exchange connections, would they have been able to execute the trades? If the exchange can match a buyer and a seller, you don't need a "market maker". Market makers provide liquidity in infrequently traded assets. For frequently traded assets, you don't need market makers, just matching of buyers and sellers.
    - ueieishdijw 4y ago
    - astrange 4y ago
      They wouldn’t be able to without charging fees; retail orders are too small to handle at the exchange, and Robinhood doesn’t AFAIK have their own internalizer.
    - dchftcs 4y ago
      The matching of buyers and sellers is a hard problem. When there's a limit order book, meaning bid and ask resting orders on NYSE, by definition the buyers and sells can't be matched. To "match buyers and sellers", one needs to buy from someone at time T, and hope to sell to someone else at time >T, during which time the market could have gone up or down. It's a risk-taking processes and a problem that's underappreciated by those who never actually tried to look at the basics of how an exchange works. Also the best bid and offers on exchanges are often already market makers. To say you "don't need" market makers because of liquidity is a bit circular.
- logifail 4y ago
  > the retail traders I have a friend who works in HFT[0][1], over a beer or three in central London a few years ago he told me that in his world a common description of retail trading is "dumb flow". When your intentions to trade are being sold to the HFTs before your trades are even priced, I guess that does indeed rate you "dumb". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading [1] https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2015/12/15/is-high-frequency-trading-good-for-capital-markets/ https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2015/12/15/is-high-frequ...
  - astrange 4y ago
    You can’t sell retail traders’ intentions to anyone. They trade in single blocks and effectively trade at random (some people need to sell even if someone else is buying), so there’s no hint of what they’re doing. HFT only trades against institutional multi-block traders. The institutional people wrote Flash Boys to distract you from that.
  - kareemsabri 4y ago
    I don't think it does. If I'm buying AAPL on a 10-year time horizon, and some HFT trader front-runs my trade for some fractions of a penny, that doesn't really harm me as far as I can tell.
- ctvo 4y ago
  > It seems that the retail traders are doing better than the institutional types Who do you think benefits most that this myth continues to propagate? The myth that the common man, with 1,000 USD to his name, can go on a trading app and do better than the financial elites and gain financial independence? Why would anyone in the market want to disabuse you of this when it brings in so much dumb money.
ok_dad 4y ago
So basically they’re gonna figure out how to game the system for the institutional investors. I never thought that those “superstonks” folks would be proven right that the system is rigged, but there it is in plain text.
- bdonlan 4y ago
  Do you want to elaborate on which specific changes listed in the article are, in your opinion, beneficial to institutional investors at the expense of retail investors, and how?
  - kcl 4y ago
    I don't know where this method of argumentation came from, but it's obnoxious and I'm over it. There are even soyjaks for this. Either you don't know and you're being lazy (I don't think this is the case), or you do know and you've generated an asymmetric work request for op that you could've answered and that left unanswered by him casts doubt on his argument. If you have a case to make, make it, instead of this nonsense DoS attack. This is not a defense of op's position.
    - sumy23 4y ago
      Your outrage is unwarranted. The proposed changes are: 1) Limiting PFOF because it creates possible conflicts of interest. 2) Limiting "gamification" of trading via engagement prompts. 3) Adding sub-penny prices to exchanges to harmonize them with market makers. This is to encourage more orders to be sent to exchanges instead of market makers. How are any of these things capitulating to institutional investors?
    - Hasu 4y ago
      Which "argument method", asking questions to gain a further understanding of a position both for yourself and the person you're asking? I'm pretty sure that it came from Socrates.
      - Redoubts 4y ago
flenserboy 4y ago
Quit picking winners, government.
Pulcinella 4y ago
Gensler has criticized the "gamification of trading" in which commission-free brokerages encourage excessive trading using lights, noises, notifications and other gimmicks to generate more PFOF. Normally I despise gamification, but this just reads to me as “Kids these days. Back in my day we had shouting, loud clothing, and platform shoes on the trading floor. None of this new fangled digital stuff!”
- lupire 4y ago
  To put in gamer language: the latency and bandwidth are valuable for performance, not the RGB lights.
- potatoyogurt 4y ago
  A very small number of people trade by voice on trading floors and they are generally professionals. This is categorically different from phone apps that reach into every ordinary person's living room. No one is advocating for a return to pre-electronic markets.
  - somenewaccount1 4y ago
    Worse, thier advocating for the SEC to somehow be experts in ux design and impose ui restrictions. No thanks.
- sidlls 4y ago
  It's a little disingenuous, in my opinion, to compare earnest opposition to exploitative or dangerous use of new technology to a ludditism.
  - andrewflnr 4y ago
    It's a little disingenuous to assume the new technology is actually exploitative or dangerous, when accusing one of said tech's defenders of disingenuity.
    - tbrownaw 4y ago
tiku 4y ago
So nothing about the selling of stock they didn't own etc? That was one of the problems if I remember correctly. I wonder when the stock market is going to adapt some of cryptos tech, so that you can store your stock on your own PC instead of an exchange, like the paper versions.
- logifail 4y ago
  > selling of stock they didn't own Compared with all the other stuff that goes on in finance, it's really really hard to see short selling as bad. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/05/experts-including-warren-buffett--say-short-selling-can-be-beneficial-for-markets.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/05/experts-including-warren-buf...
  - chrischattin 4y ago
    Short selling wasn’t the issue in this case. It was loaning out shares to short that straight up didn’t exist.
    - logifail 4y ago
      > loaning out shares to short that straight up didn’t exist We should note that naked shorting was apparently just fine until not that long ago[0]. [0] https://seekingalpha.com/article/4453048-naked-short-selling https://seekingalpha.com/article/4453048-naked-short-selling
    - Hasu 4y ago
      The SEC didn't find any evidence of naked shorts in the GameStop debacle. Some people confuse naked shorts - which are currently illegal - with the simple finance fact that the same stock can be shorted more than once. Let's say A owns 1 stock. I borrow it from him and short sell it to B. Now I owe A one stock, and B owns one stock. There is no reason(1) I can't borrow that stock from B, and short sell it to C. I now owe A and B each one stock, and C owns 1 stock. You can continue doing this as much as you want, and create effectively infinite short positions without ever doing a naked short. (1) Well aside from the the practicalities that it overleverages you and if your short position gets called you are completely screwed, and eventually you might not be able to find any stocks to borrow for shorting purposes, but there's no theoretical reason you can't do this.
wayeq 4y ago
I didn't read the article and I'm deeply upset by this.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  Can't tell if sarcastic or not, because so many of the comments here along the lines of "the SEC is sticking it to the little guy" are clearly from people that haven't read the 3 proposals in the article, which are all detrimental to large institutional interests for the benefit of smaller traders.
this_user 4y ago
So this report pretty much disproves all of the assumptions that the meme stock conspiracy theorist have been making: Robinhood had to disable opening new positions, because they are unable to meet their margin requirements. They only survived, because they were granted a discretionary rebate. Otherwise, the DTCC could have taken control of their entire portfolio, and could have liquidated everything to protect its other member firms. RH had poor internal practices, and did not fully understand how these margin amounts were calculated, nor had they implemented best practices for modelling those. Additionally, they technological infrastructure had already been at the edge of breaking down under the load for days even before the meme stock event. Citadel Securities had nothing to do with RH not accepting new buy orders. In fact, they were the only one of RH's six market makers who never asked them to route away orders. The only thing the did negotiate for was a reduction of PFOF rebates, because RH was using its own, non-standard approach for calculating those that resulted in RH receiving a huge increase in rebates.
- boeingUH60 4y ago
  I wouldn't trust any word of the meme stock conspiracy theorists. If you can stomach it, visit r/SuperStonk, and it's basically like QAnon of Finance...with many posts screaming Ken Griffin bad!
  - savant_penguin 4y ago
    Sir this is a casino
- PartiallyTyped 4y ago
  > Robinhood had to disable opening new positions, because they are unable to meet their margin requirements. It wasn't just RH that blocked buy orders. Revolut did as well, and at least 2 others if my memory serves me correct.
- qaq 4y ago
  DTCC is not a government entity and not very transparent. One other thing people overlook is that RH and others make money among other things by landing out stocks to short so had huge exposure to counter party risk on the meme stocks they have lent out to shorts. Which made their interests even less aligned with their customers.
adrianmonk 4y ago
NPR's "The Indicator" had a recent episode on this: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1106468243 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1106468243 Part of it was an explanation of what Payment For Order Flow (PFOF) is. They also had a few short comments by a researcher on the potential conflicts of interest. His opinion was that there are two, and one of them (ensuring customers get a fair price) is solvable but the other (brokerages having an incentive to steer customers toward trades with higher PFOF) is more problematic. It sounds like the SEC hasn't decided whether to ban PFOF or just require more disclosure about prices, which seems to match up with what that researcher said. (Also point of trivia from the NPR episode: PFOF was invented by Bernie Madoff.)
- horsawlarway 4y ago
  NPR's marketplace also touched on this over the last week, and does a decent job laying out the basics. Generally speaking - I think we're seeing the same dilemma here you see with digital advertising: The "customer" now pays no trading fees, but because they're no longer funding the activity through those fees, they start to become the product sold, and the actual customer getting catered to is now the brokerage paying the best PFOF... which they can likely do because they inflate their earnings by taking a larger cut, which means the original "customer" is still likely paying anyways, but they now have no recourse and no say in how they are bought and sold. I'm not at all a fan of the kind of perverse incentives that pop up when you have to trust an agent, and that agent is getting paid better by someone else to fuck you. We have fiduciary duty laws for a reason - this situation leads to bad places. For comparison - the vast majority of EU states have this banned as under their inducement to trade laws.
  - anticristi 4y ago
    > For comparison - the vast majority of EU states have this banned as under their inducement to trade laws. Interesting. Didn't know about this. Can you send me a link to something like Wikipedia or an EU regulation?
    - horsawlarway 4y ago
snowwrestler 4y ago
The framing of this article makes it seem like the SEC is acting to protect the hedge funds from the little retail investor. The reality is that many naive first-time retail investors experienced big losses on the backside of the meme stock rally, to the benefit of a few sophisticated retail investors: the ones who incited the rally in the first place. This was possible in part because they were working on top of a new system of well-marketed apps that made trades free and incentivized. Taking all the friction out of the system made it easier for a few people to whip it around with emotion. The problem is structural which is why the SEC is looking at it.
- thr0wawayf00 4y ago
  Exactly. That combined with incredibly low interest rates for years motivated people to put more and more cash into the stock market because CDs and saving account returns are a total joke nowadays. The total amount of cash that has flowed into the stock market over the last two years has been insane.[0] 0: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/09/investors-have-put-more-money-into-stocks-in-the-last-5-months-than-the-previous-12-years-combined.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/09/investors-have-put-more-mone...
  - mvc 4y ago
    Has there ever been a time when investors could expect to earn a high rate of interest on risk-free investments during a period of very low inflation?
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Educated investors behaving rationally? No. But plenty of people in these pages and elsewhere get upset whenever the SEC tries to impose some modicum of rules that try to limit investments by people who don't have at least some veneer of education about financial markets.
    - hakfoo 4y ago
      I think it's not unreasonable to ask for "beats inflation" in non-crisis economic times. I still recall my first savings account paid 6.44% in 1987 or so, and the inflation rate then was ~3.5%. It was with Lincoln Savings, which some of you might remember had a little collapse problem shortly thereafter. Still, the next one I went to (actually, not due to the collapse) paid 5%. The traditional story of how a bank works, usually presented in comic-strip form somewhere around 10th grade civics class, was roughly: * Inflation is M% * Retail lends the bank money at N%, for some N typically >= M. The primary motivation for doing so is less the interest, and more that it's safer to keep the money there than in a dresser drawer where the kids will eventually find it and exchange it for snack foods that are colours that don't exist in nature and premium currency for borderline-pornographic F2P games. * The bank lends it to productive economic entities at N+3%, who convert it into PowerPoint slides, bribes for Congressmen, and freight costs for shipping productive assets from Illinois to Guangdong. * The 3% spread enables the bank to sponsor various golf tournaments and buy impressive buildings that totally weren't a Del Taco last year, to ensure you feel secure that they'll still return your money when asked politely. I suspect what derails the entire narrative is when the bank no longer needs retail to lend them money. When central banks will do it for virtually free, there's no reason to try to wrangle depositors anymore.
tomcam 4y ago
I can’t seem to find any comments here, or anything mentioned in the article about the fact that free people made their own decisions and had to absorb the risk. I don’t know what’s wrong with that.
- tbrownaw 4y ago
  Systems that make it too easy to accidentally get in over your head and turn into a sucker are probably bad for society.
Pv9KKy3 4y ago
Any resolution to the failure to deliver issue? Folks selling stuff they don't own, and then not even fixing the issue in time for settlement? It's so weird that the SEC doesn't crack down harder on this behavior by the bigger players. The volume in dollars and shares is massive. The penalties way too light. This would seem casually to create real fragilities in the system. If I'm reading this correctly about $42B worth of fails in the second half of may alone.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  This is not an issue. Only certain players can naked short, namely, market makers, and they earn that privilege by having margin requirements that satisfy the trade in almost every situation. The edge cases usually involve a hedge fund going bust. (For example, if a market maker simultaneously buys from a leveraged fund and sells, then the fund goes under. In that case, the market maker has a certain number of days to pony up or get collateral seized.)
  - Pv9KKy3 4y ago
    Except it's a massive issue. Millions of shares and billions of dollars in stuff fails to deliver. For something that shouldn't be an issue this should be impossible, but it happens routinely. https://www.sec.gov/data/foiadocsfailsdatahtm https://www.sec.gov/data/foiadocsfailsdatahtm and download and total up the value of all the fails - it's eye opening. Fail-to-Deliver Shares Value PIMCO DIOF Jan. 29 $422M iShares Core Bond ETF Jan. 20 379M iShares U.S. FA Bond ETF Jan. 19 361M GameStop Jan. 28 359M GameStop Jan. 27 292M These are fails on just one day. It's pathetic this is allowed. You should not be able to sell something you can't deliver.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > it's a massive issue. Millions of shares and billions of dollars in stuff fails to deliver It’s not. FTD means failure on a particular timeline. Almost all of those shares get delivered in the end. > You should not be able to sell something you can't deliver You can trade this way if you want. It’s special settlement and you’ll pay out the nose [1] for zero benefit. But sometimes people do weird things with derivatives and need instantaneous settlement. So someone (usually a bank) with stock certificates will sell them, zero settlement risk involved, for a premium. (This is what someone facing FTD penalties will eventually have to do.) FTD is a non-issue. It has zero practical downside. It nevertheless serves as catnip for Redditors trying to redirect blame for their gambling losses. [1] Out of curiosity, I checked with a former colleague. They said they used to charge a flat fee, but recently switched to match crypto fees, since a lot of crypto people have been looking to instantly settle and they’re used to paying massive transaction costs. TIL.
kareemsabri 4y ago
I'm not sure I see the problem here, given the current SEC opinion on broker-dealers and their responsibility. As I recall, broker-dealers are legally required to get you the best price they can. Having an "incentive" to do otherwise doesn't much matter, since it's illegal. > Giving brokers incentives to encourage customers to trade more frequently to maximize the payments This is also true of brokers who charge commissions. Brokers want their customers to trade. It is a conflict of interest, and always has been, but it's not unique to PFOF. Broker-dealers, unlike an investment advisor, are NOT fiduciaries and are not required to act in their customers best interests. > Gensler has criticized the "gamification of trading" in which commission-free brokerages encourage excessive trading using lights, noises, notifications and other gimmicks to generate more PFOF. It's not clear to me what's a gimmick, and what's just a better UI/UX. This seems difficult to police and I'm not convinced retail investors are so dumb that lights and noises make them trade.
- abbadadda 4y ago
  > Broker-dealers, unlike an investment advisor, are NOT fiduciaries and are not required to act in their customers best interests. I agree broker-dealers are not fiduciaries, but aren’t zero commission trades for customers better than commissioned trades? And is not about maximizing the payments as the SEC says, it is about the lack of “toxicity” in the orders; the assumption is that trading against retail flow is that it is more valuable to market makers because the trades are less likely to be informed on which direction the market is going to go. This does not mean retail traders are not getting the best price, just that market makers are willing to pay a premium to interact with this flow. > As I recall, broker-dealers are legally required to get you the best price they can. With PFOF, broker-dealers are still required to honor the best price posted by the national exchanges as per Reg NMS. > I'm not convinced retail investors are so dumb that lights and noises make them trade. Are you sure about that? IMO, It isn’t too dissimilar from making brokerage accounts more like slot machines or candy crush. If you can make something more addictive for your customers to use, it could be a problem. Making it illegal to use push notifications to trigger FOMO seems like an easy move to make on this front.
  - 4y ago
somenewaccount1 4y ago
Force apps using PFOF for free trades to also have a paid-trade market fallback option available. The fact they don't consider this simple solution tells me it's all bullshit to protect the larger institutions.

84 points by slowhand09 4y ago

It seems that the retail traders are doing better than the institutional types, so the "fix" is to hamstring the retail folks to maintain the status-quo, and make it look like they're doing a favor for retail by acting deeply concerned.

Victerius 4y ago
That's a childish take. Here's what the article says are the SEC's actual concerns: Gary Gensler, the SEC chief, has criticized payment for order flow (PFOF), a practice in which some commission-free brokers generate revenue by sending customer orders to wholesale market makers in return for payments, rather than to exchanges. He has said a ban on the practice is not off the table as it raises potential conflicts of interest, giving brokers incentives to encourage customers to trade more frequently to maximize the payments. The meme stock trading frenzy exposed concerns about the ways in which PFOF increases complexity and potential fragility in the securities markets, the House Financial Services Committee report said. Proponents say PFOF is a major reason brokerages were able to stop charging trading commissions, and retail investors often get a lower, better price than they would on the main exchange. Gensler has criticized the "gamification of trading" in which commission-free brokerages encourage excessive trading using lights, noises, notifications and other gimmicks to generate more PFOF. He has also highlighted the use of artificial intelligence, predictive data analytics and machine learning to push products. In August 2021, the SEC issued a consultation on potential new rules to limit gamification and other "digital engagement prompts." The agency is expected to proceed with a rule change in the coming months. read more The U.S. House Financial Services Committee on Friday urged Congress to adopt legislation mandating the SEC study how its rules need to change to address new technological developments, such as digital engagement practices and social media-driven market activity. The GameStop saga highlighted the small number of market-makers -- brokers that execute trades and publicly post buy and sell quotes for others to trade -- that dominate the retail market, which may pose competition issues, Gensler has said. The House Financial Services Committee said that at the time of the Reddit rally, Robinhood was not connected to any exchanges, and of the six market makers Robinhood routed all its customers' orders to, nearly all were unable to execute trades in certain meme stocks due to the market stress. "Had all these market makers been unable to execute trades, Robinhood would have been unable to execute trades on behalf of its customers," the report said. Nearly all retail trades are executed away from exchanges. That is partly due to rules that allow market makers to offer fractional sub-penny price improvement on bids and offers, whereas exchanges have to quote in pennies. Gensler has said that has created an uneven playing field in the competition for retail orders. _______ As an aside, institutional investors, like pension funds, are not trying to generate +500% returns on options or meme stocks. They're not trying to beat traders. They're more comfortable with stable rates of return over the long term. +2%-3% per year. Not hard to beat for a day trader.
- Animats 4y ago
  The House Financial Services Committee said that at the time of the Reddit rally, Robinhood was not connected to any exchanges, and of the six market makers Robinhood routed all its customers' orders to, nearly all were unable to execute trades in certain meme stocks due to the market stress. Had Robinhood had actual exchange connections, would they have been able to execute the trades? If the exchange can match a buyer and a seller, you don't need a "market maker". Market makers provide liquidity in infrequently traded assets. For frequently traded assets, you don't need market makers, just matching of buyers and sellers.
  - ueieishdijw 4y ago
  - astrange 4y ago
    They wouldn’t be able to without charging fees; retail orders are too small to handle at the exchange, and Robinhood doesn’t AFAIK have their own internalizer.
  - dchftcs 4y ago
    The matching of buyers and sellers is a hard problem. When there's a limit order book, meaning bid and ask resting orders on NYSE, by definition the buyers and sells can't be matched. To "match buyers and sellers", one needs to buy from someone at time T, and hope to sell to someone else at time >T, during which time the market could have gone up or down. It's a risk-taking processes and a problem that's underappreciated by those who never actually tried to look at the basics of how an exchange works. Also the best bid and offers on exchanges are often already market makers. To say you "don't need" market makers because of liquidity is a bit circular.
logifail 4y ago
> the retail traders I have a friend who works in HFT[0][1], over a beer or three in central London a few years ago he told me that in his world a common description of retail trading is "dumb flow". When your intentions to trade are being sold to the HFTs before your trades are even priced, I guess that does indeed rate you "dumb". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading [1] https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2015/12/15/is-high-frequency-trading-good-for-capital-markets/ https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2015/12/15/is-high-frequ...
- astrange 4y ago
  You can’t sell retail traders’ intentions to anyone. They trade in single blocks and effectively trade at random (some people need to sell even if someone else is buying), so there’s no hint of what they’re doing. HFT only trades against institutional multi-block traders. The institutional people wrote Flash Boys to distract you from that.
- kareemsabri 4y ago
  I don't think it does. If I'm buying AAPL on a 10-year time horizon, and some HFT trader front-runs my trade for some fractions of a penny, that doesn't really harm me as far as I can tell.
ctvo 4y ago
> It seems that the retail traders are doing better than the institutional types Who do you think benefits most that this myth continues to propagate? The myth that the common man, with 1,000 USD to his name, can go on a trading app and do better than the financial elites and gain financial independence? Why would anyone in the market want to disabuse you of this when it brings in so much dumb money.

ok_dad 4y ago

So basically they’re gonna figure out how to game the system for the institutional investors. I never thought that those “superstonks” folks would be proven right that the system is rigged, but there it is in plain text.

bdonlan 4y ago
Do you want to elaborate on which specific changes listed in the article are, in your opinion, beneficial to institutional investors at the expense of retail investors, and how?
- kcl 4y ago
  I don't know where this method of argumentation came from, but it's obnoxious and I'm over it. There are even soyjaks for this. Either you don't know and you're being lazy (I don't think this is the case), or you do know and you've generated an asymmetric work request for op that you could've answered and that left unanswered by him casts doubt on his argument. If you have a case to make, make it, instead of this nonsense DoS attack. This is not a defense of op's position.
  - sumy23 4y ago
    Your outrage is unwarranted. The proposed changes are: 1) Limiting PFOF because it creates possible conflicts of interest. 2) Limiting "gamification" of trading via engagement prompts. 3) Adding sub-penny prices to exchanges to harmonize them with market makers. This is to encourage more orders to be sent to exchanges instead of market makers. How are any of these things capitulating to institutional investors?
  - Hasu 4y ago
    Which "argument method", asking questions to gain a further understanding of a position both for yourself and the person you're asking? I'm pretty sure that it came from Socrates.
    - Redoubts 4y ago

flenserboy 4y ago

Quit picking winners, government.

Pulcinella 4y ago

Gensler has criticized the "gamification of trading" in which commission-free brokerages encourage excessive trading using lights, noises, notifications and other gimmicks to generate more PFOF. Normally I despise gamification, but this just reads to me as “Kids these days. Back in my day we had shouting, loud clothing, and platform shoes on the trading floor. None of this new fangled digital stuff!”

lupire 4y ago
To put in gamer language: the latency and bandwidth are valuable for performance, not the RGB lights.
potatoyogurt 4y ago
A very small number of people trade by voice on trading floors and they are generally professionals. This is categorically different from phone apps that reach into every ordinary person's living room. No one is advocating for a return to pre-electronic markets.
- somenewaccount1 4y ago
  Worse, thier advocating for the SEC to somehow be experts in ux design and impose ui restrictions. No thanks.
sidlls 4y ago
It's a little disingenuous, in my opinion, to compare earnest opposition to exploitative or dangerous use of new technology to a ludditism.
- andrewflnr 4y ago
  It's a little disingenuous to assume the new technology is actually exploitative or dangerous, when accusing one of said tech's defenders of disingenuity.
  - tbrownaw 4y ago

tiku 4y ago

So nothing about the selling of stock they didn't own etc? That was one of the problems if I remember correctly. I wonder when the stock market is going to adapt some of cryptos tech, so that you can store your stock on your own PC instead of an exchange, like the paper versions.

logifail 4y ago
> selling of stock they didn't own Compared with all the other stuff that goes on in finance, it's really really hard to see short selling as bad. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/05/experts-including-warren-buffett--say-short-selling-can-be-beneficial-for-markets.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/05/experts-including-warren-buf...
- chrischattin 4y ago
  Short selling wasn’t the issue in this case. It was loaning out shares to short that straight up didn’t exist.
  - logifail 4y ago
    > loaning out shares to short that straight up didn’t exist We should note that naked shorting was apparently just fine until not that long ago[0]. [0] https://seekingalpha.com/article/4453048-naked-short-selling https://seekingalpha.com/article/4453048-naked-short-selling
  - Hasu 4y ago
    The SEC didn't find any evidence of naked shorts in the GameStop debacle. Some people confuse naked shorts - which are currently illegal - with the simple finance fact that the same stock can be shorted more than once. Let's say A owns 1 stock. I borrow it from him and short sell it to B. Now I owe A one stock, and B owns one stock. There is no reason(1) I can't borrow that stock from B, and short sell it to C. I now owe A and B each one stock, and C owns 1 stock. You can continue doing this as much as you want, and create effectively infinite short positions without ever doing a naked short. (1) Well aside from the the practicalities that it overleverages you and if your short position gets called you are completely screwed, and eventually you might not be able to find any stocks to borrow for shorting purposes, but there's no theoretical reason you can't do this.

wayeq 4y ago

I didn't read the article and I'm deeply upset by this.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
Can't tell if sarcastic or not, because so many of the comments here along the lines of "the SEC is sticking it to the little guy" are clearly from people that haven't read the 3 proposals in the article, which are all detrimental to large institutional interests for the benefit of smaller traders.

this_user 4y ago

So this report pretty much disproves all of the assumptions that the meme stock conspiracy theorist have been making: Robinhood had to disable opening new positions, because they are unable to meet their margin requirements. They only survived, because they were granted a discretionary rebate. Otherwise, the DTCC could have taken control of their entire portfolio, and could have liquidated everything to protect its other member firms. RH had poor internal practices, and did not fully understand how these margin amounts were calculated, nor had they implemented best practices for modelling those. Additionally, they technological infrastructure had already been at the edge of breaking down under the load for days even before the meme stock event. Citadel Securities had nothing to do with RH not accepting new buy orders. In fact, they were the only one of RH's six market makers who never asked them to route away orders. The only thing the did negotiate for was a reduction of PFOF rebates, because RH was using its own, non-standard approach for calculating those that resulted in RH receiving a huge increase in rebates.

boeingUH60 4y ago
I wouldn't trust any word of the meme stock conspiracy theorists. If you can stomach it, visit r/SuperStonk, and it's basically like QAnon of Finance...with many posts screaming Ken Griffin bad!
- savant_penguin 4y ago
  Sir this is a casino
PartiallyTyped 4y ago
> Robinhood had to disable opening new positions, because they are unable to meet their margin requirements. It wasn't just RH that blocked buy orders. Revolut did as well, and at least 2 others if my memory serves me correct.
qaq 4y ago
DTCC is not a government entity and not very transparent. One other thing people overlook is that RH and others make money among other things by landing out stocks to short so had huge exposure to counter party risk on the meme stocks they have lent out to shorts. Which made their interests even less aligned with their customers.

adrianmonk 4y ago

NPR's "The Indicator" had a recent episode on this: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1106468243 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1106468243 Part of it was an explanation of what Payment For Order Flow (PFOF) is. They also had a few short comments by a researcher on the potential conflicts of interest. His opinion was that there are two, and one of them (ensuring customers get a fair price) is solvable but the other (brokerages having an incentive to steer customers toward trades with higher PFOF) is more problematic. It sounds like the SEC hasn't decided whether to ban PFOF or just require more disclosure about prices, which seems to match up with what that researcher said. (Also point of trivia from the NPR episode: PFOF was invented by Bernie Madoff.)

horsawlarway 4y ago
NPR's marketplace also touched on this over the last week, and does a decent job laying out the basics. Generally speaking - I think we're seeing the same dilemma here you see with digital advertising: The "customer" now pays no trading fees, but because they're no longer funding the activity through those fees, they start to become the product sold, and the actual customer getting catered to is now the brokerage paying the best PFOF... which they can likely do because they inflate their earnings by taking a larger cut, which means the original "customer" is still likely paying anyways, but they now have no recourse and no say in how they are bought and sold. I'm not at all a fan of the kind of perverse incentives that pop up when you have to trust an agent, and that agent is getting paid better by someone else to fuck you. We have fiduciary duty laws for a reason - this situation leads to bad places. For comparison - the vast majority of EU states have this banned as under their inducement to trade laws.
- anticristi 4y ago
  > For comparison - the vast majority of EU states have this banned as under their inducement to trade laws. Interesting. Didn't know about this. Can you send me a link to something like Wikipedia or an EU regulation?
  - horsawlarway 4y ago

snowwrestler 4y ago

The framing of this article makes it seem like the SEC is acting to protect the hedge funds from the little retail investor. The reality is that many naive first-time retail investors experienced big losses on the backside of the meme stock rally, to the benefit of a few sophisticated retail investors: the ones who incited the rally in the first place. This was possible in part because they were working on top of a new system of well-marketed apps that made trades free and incentivized. Taking all the friction out of the system made it easier for a few people to whip it around with emotion. The problem is structural which is why the SEC is looking at it.

thr0wawayf00 4y ago
Exactly. That combined with incredibly low interest rates for years motivated people to put more and more cash into the stock market because CDs and saving account returns are a total joke nowadays. The total amount of cash that has flowed into the stock market over the last two years has been insane.[0] 0: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/09/investors-have-put-more-money-into-stocks-in-the-last-5-months-than-the-previous-12-years-combined.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/09/investors-have-put-more-mone...
- mvc 4y ago
  Has there ever been a time when investors could expect to earn a high rate of interest on risk-free investments during a period of very low inflation?
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Educated investors behaving rationally? No. But plenty of people in these pages and elsewhere get upset whenever the SEC tries to impose some modicum of rules that try to limit investments by people who don't have at least some veneer of education about financial markets.
  - hakfoo 4y ago
    I think it's not unreasonable to ask for "beats inflation" in non-crisis economic times. I still recall my first savings account paid 6.44% in 1987 or so, and the inflation rate then was ~3.5%. It was with Lincoln Savings, which some of you might remember had a little collapse problem shortly thereafter. Still, the next one I went to (actually, not due to the collapse) paid 5%. The traditional story of how a bank works, usually presented in comic-strip form somewhere around 10th grade civics class, was roughly: * Inflation is M% * Retail lends the bank money at N%, for some N typically >= M. The primary motivation for doing so is less the interest, and more that it's safer to keep the money there than in a dresser drawer where the kids will eventually find it and exchange it for snack foods that are colours that don't exist in nature and premium currency for borderline-pornographic F2P games. * The bank lends it to productive economic entities at N+3%, who convert it into PowerPoint slides, bribes for Congressmen, and freight costs for shipping productive assets from Illinois to Guangdong. * The 3% spread enables the bank to sponsor various golf tournaments and buy impressive buildings that totally weren't a Del Taco last year, to ensure you feel secure that they'll still return your money when asked politely. I suspect what derails the entire narrative is when the bank no longer needs retail to lend them money. When central banks will do it for virtually free, there's no reason to try to wrangle depositors anymore.

tomcam 4y ago

I can’t seem to find any comments here, or anything mentioned in the article about the fact that free people made their own decisions and had to absorb the risk. I don’t know what’s wrong with that.

tbrownaw 4y ago
Systems that make it too easy to accidentally get in over your head and turn into a sucker are probably bad for society.

Pv9KKy3 4y ago

Any resolution to the failure to deliver issue? Folks selling stuff they don't own, and then not even fixing the issue in time for settlement? It's so weird that the SEC doesn't crack down harder on this behavior by the bigger players. The volume in dollars and shares is massive. The penalties way too light. This would seem casually to create real fragilities in the system. If I'm reading this correctly about $42B worth of fails in the second half of may alone.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
This is not an issue. Only certain players can naked short, namely, market makers, and they earn that privilege by having margin requirements that satisfy the trade in almost every situation. The edge cases usually involve a hedge fund going bust. (For example, if a market maker simultaneously buys from a leveraged fund and sells, then the fund goes under. In that case, the market maker has a certain number of days to pony up or get collateral seized.)
- Pv9KKy3 4y ago
  Except it's a massive issue. Millions of shares and billions of dollars in stuff fails to deliver. For something that shouldn't be an issue this should be impossible, but it happens routinely. https://www.sec.gov/data/foiadocsfailsdatahtm https://www.sec.gov/data/foiadocsfailsdatahtm and download and total up the value of all the fails - it's eye opening. Fail-to-Deliver Shares Value PIMCO DIOF Jan. 29 $422M iShares Core Bond ETF Jan. 20 379M iShares U.S. FA Bond ETF Jan. 19 361M GameStop Jan. 28 359M GameStop Jan. 27 292M These are fails on just one day. It's pathetic this is allowed. You should not be able to sell something you can't deliver.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > it's a massive issue. Millions of shares and billions of dollars in stuff fails to deliver It’s not. FTD means failure on a particular timeline. Almost all of those shares get delivered in the end. > You should not be able to sell something you can't deliver You can trade this way if you want. It’s special settlement and you’ll pay out the nose [1] for zero benefit. But sometimes people do weird things with derivatives and need instantaneous settlement. So someone (usually a bank) with stock certificates will sell them, zero settlement risk involved, for a premium. (This is what someone facing FTD penalties will eventually have to do.) FTD is a non-issue. It has zero practical downside. It nevertheless serves as catnip for Redditors trying to redirect blame for their gambling losses. [1] Out of curiosity, I checked with a former colleague. They said they used to charge a flat fee, but recently switched to match crypto fees, since a lot of crypto people have been looking to instantly settle and they’re used to paying massive transaction costs. TIL.

kareemsabri 4y ago

I'm not sure I see the problem here, given the current SEC opinion on broker-dealers and their responsibility. As I recall, broker-dealers are legally required to get you the best price they can. Having an "incentive" to do otherwise doesn't much matter, since it's illegal. > Giving brokers incentives to encourage customers to trade more frequently to maximize the payments This is also true of brokers who charge commissions. Brokers want their customers to trade. It is a conflict of interest, and always has been, but it's not unique to PFOF. Broker-dealers, unlike an investment advisor, are NOT fiduciaries and are not required to act in their customers best interests. > Gensler has criticized the "gamification of trading" in which commission-free brokerages encourage excessive trading using lights, noises, notifications and other gimmicks to generate more PFOF. It's not clear to me what's a gimmick, and what's just a better UI/UX. This seems difficult to police and I'm not convinced retail investors are so dumb that lights and noises make them trade.

abbadadda 4y ago
> Broker-dealers, unlike an investment advisor, are NOT fiduciaries and are not required to act in their customers best interests. I agree broker-dealers are not fiduciaries, but aren’t zero commission trades for customers better than commissioned trades? And is not about maximizing the payments as the SEC says, it is about the lack of “toxicity” in the orders; the assumption is that trading against retail flow is that it is more valuable to market makers because the trades are less likely to be informed on which direction the market is going to go. This does not mean retail traders are not getting the best price, just that market makers are willing to pay a premium to interact with this flow. > As I recall, broker-dealers are legally required to get you the best price they can. With PFOF, broker-dealers are still required to honor the best price posted by the national exchanges as per Reg NMS. > I'm not convinced retail investors are so dumb that lights and noises make them trade. Are you sure about that? IMO, It isn’t too dissimilar from making brokerage accounts more like slot machines or candy crush. If you can make something more addictive for your customers to use, it could be a problem. Making it illegal to use push notifications to trigger FOMO seems like an easy move to make on this front.
- 4y ago

somenewaccount1 4y ago

Force apps using PFOF for free trades to also have a paid-trade market fallback option available. The fact they don't consider this simple solution tells me it's all bullshit to protect the larger institutions.