"Meanwhile, Barclays was advertising LX to high-frequency traders by offering them more information, lower fees, and faster connections than it gave to institut

"Meanwhile, Barclays was advertising LX to high-frequency traders by offering them more information, lower fees, and faster connections than it gave to institutional investors." Whether intentional or not, it sounds like they built a combination public swimming pool / alligator farm. Marc Andressen recently penned a screed that made the rounds about how Sarbox and friends have killed the IPO. He's not wrong there. IPOs are happening much later and less frequently because of regulation. Where he's wrong is... well... he's basically like a resident in a high crime neighborhood asking why all the shops have bars on their windows. It's driving away business after all! Let's take those bars off the windows... But as soon as you do that, you get a smash and grab the next night. Sorry Marc, but there's bars on the windows because the neighborhood is full of thugs. The ultimate problem -- and the ultimate thing that has killed the IPO -- is that the financial system is full of glorified white collar street hustlers who look at markets as something to bust out for short term profits. Like the proverbial bad neighborhood I think the only solution might be to move out. I can see technologies like Bitcoin and systems like crowd funding as the embryonic beginnings of a new financial system with greater intrinsic transparency and with cryptographic authentication baked in from the get-go. Perhaps, with that added transparency, it'll be possible to engineer in a fundamentally better security model to discourage predation.