Good questions. * Along with order routing, market data is heavily legislated under RegNMS as well. Both the creation of the SIP feeds (the slower consolidated

Good questions. * Along with order routing, market data is heavily legislated under RegNMS as well. Both the creation of the SIP feeds (the slower consolidated data) and the rules around exchange proprietary feeds are legislated there. As part of the Fair Access Rule, exchanges cannot favor a certain participant with preferential pricing. Therefore, even if proprietary exchange data products are expensive, they are equally expensive to all participants. I consider that fair. An argument could be made that the price of the feeds is exclusionary. I do not buy this - there are many types of data available in the market that come at a high price. The next question (if you assume that the price makes it effectively non-public) is if there are effective substitutes. I think for non-professional traders (moving less than, say, $10mm notional per month) the SIP and similar feeds is acceptable (just as many retail traders accept 15min delayed market data as acceptable). For more serious traders, there may not be an acceptable substitute, but given their usage the higher costs are more justified. * Ethical rules around front running of orders is covered in the Manning Rule. In short, it prevents placing a firm's trading interests in front of a client. The details can be found at FINRA: http://finra.complinet.com/en/display/display.html?rbid=2403&element_id=9989 http://finra.complinet.com/en/display/display.html?rbid=2403...