Trade news roundup

By: Ray Pellecchia

File Under: NYSE

• 0 Comments
• Email Entry

Loads of stuff of interest in this week’s Securities Industry News (subscription only), including:

· A big excerpt of John Thain’s testimony on regulation. (You can get the full version here).

· A big excerpt of the NYSE Hearing Panel decision in the NYSE-SEC settlement with Bear Stearns, involving charges of illegal market timing and late trading of mutual funds, resulting in a $250 million fine. Full version here.

· Nearest to my Hybrid heart, updates on Hybrid and Reg. NMS, including possible NMS deadline delay (because the publication is a weekly, the latest on Hybrid is a bit out of date), challenges for the various market centers (second in a series), and whether the ECNs and regionals will benefit from NMS.

A couple of voices on the latter issue:

"'The greatest overall impact of Reg. NMS will be on the New York Stock Exchange by forcing it to adopt the electronic model in its hybrid structure,' noted David Easthope, an analyst with...Celent."

"Joe Gawronski, COO at New York agency brokerage Rosenblatt Securities, sees the Reg. NMS order-protection and market-data rules renewing interest in the regionals, but with a caveat: ‘Reg. NMS alone cannot reinvigorate the exchange,’ he said. ‘At the end of the day (even in a world with much greater electronic linkages and rules that mandate routing to the best quote), only the support of their broker-dealer patrons and the actual creation of an added-value product will be enough to take market share from the NYSE and Nasdaq, much bigger players who are spending a ton of time and resources innovating.’”

I don’t know about Nasdaq, but Joe’s right about the Big Board’s investment in better execution services and information products for customers.