The Securities and Exchange Commission’s pilot program to test ways of encouraging more trading of the smallest U.S. stocks is facing major rebellion among Wall Street brokers who claim that this is an effort by exchanges to seek an edge over their rivals.
The plan is meant to spur trades in about 30 percent of the publicly traded U.S. companies. One of its provisions, called a trade at rule, is actually a stealth attempt to weaken brokers who run private trading systems that compete with the likes of the New York Stock Exchange, representatives from JP Morgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc. said yesterday at an industry conference.
Michael Masone, legal counsel for equities at Citigroup said, “The exchanges which have a hand in this and seek to benefit from the onerous version of a trade-at basically put the screws to us,” at an event sponsored by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association.
The SEC started seeking public comment on the proposals on 3rd Nov 2014. The securities regulator is responsible for approving the program’s final design. The experiment, which could start next year, is likely to widen the minimum price, or tick, at which shares are quoted on exchanges. For many companies, the tick size currently is 1 cent.
Stephen Luparello, the SEC’s director of trading and markets, said at the same industry event yesterday that brokerage firms are trying to read too much into the regulator’s plans. The SEC is open to feedback and hasn’t sided with the goals of exchanges, he said. He also added that if the SEC’s primary goal was really to test ways of discouraging trading on private trading platforms, the regulator wouldn’t target the smallest companies.
The one-year pilot program has found supporters in many influential people including lawmakers in Congress, who expect it will encourage market makers to buy and sell shares by making each transaction potentially more profitable. This, theoretically could mean that a stimulated initial public offerings would be the path forward as investment banks would have more money to bankroll research departments to tout newly public companies.
Eric Ryan, a NYSE spokesman, said the exchange operator supports the SEC’s efforts to improve trading in small and mid-size companies. Bats spokesman Randy Williams said the company remains opposed to the trade-at rule. Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. spokesman Joe Christinat declined to comment.
The plan as proposed would create four groups of companies with market values of less than $5 billion. One segment will require quotes in increments of 5 cents or more, and another will require both quotes and trades to be in 5-cent steps. In a third group, trading will be discouraged on private venues that compete with public exchanges. A fourth group will trade normally.
“It almost feels a little bit like, ‘Is this a tick pilot or a trade-at pilot?’” said Brett Redfearn, Americas head of market-structure strategy at JP Morgan, speaking at the same event as Masone.
“Getting it done this year would be pretty complicated,” SEC Commissioner Daniel Gallagher, a Republican, said last month at a conference in Washington. “My guess is we’ll get some pretty heavy comment on this thing, and it might buckle under its own weight.
Opposition to the program isn’t new. The SEC’s Investor Advisory Committee voted 13-3 in January 2014 to urge the agency not to conduct the pilot program. The SEC went ahead anyway. Opponents including Fidelity Investments say investors will have to pay more to buy and sell shares of small companies.
