Markets, conversations and blogging; plus Atkins on NMS; and Mayday

By: Ray Pellecchia

File Under: NYSE, TransactTools

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Let there be no doubt that Sam Johnson is passionate about his job as CEO of NYSE TransactTools. His personal blog features a photo of the back of his head with our "portal" logo tatooed on it. You gotta check it out.

Hope that's Photoshopped. Otherwise, looks painful. Admirable and dedicated, but painful. :D

Ink aside, looks like a terrific blog, really emblematic of thought leadership, as evidenced by yesterday's post, Marketplace Platform. Here's an excerpt, but to do it justice you really need to read the whole post to get the true context:

I like the idea of an open platform as a stack of services: interlinked physical network infrastructure at the bottom, open standards-based messaging interfaces for communication among participants, and value-added services on top of that. Doesn't exist in our industry yet. Let's get the networks on the team (at least, as far as the mobile carrier networks are on a team) and integrate a stack of technology services, starting with standardized messaging, that market participants can plug into rather than having to develop, test, integrate, and support commodity infrastructure themselves. Wouldn't this be the logical evolution of the current landscape?

And Sam is not the only Toolman blogging (Toolman? Is that OK? Like "Tim the Toolman Taylor" on the old "Home Improvement" TV show?). Here's another good blog, this one by Mike Roberts, senior director at NYSE TransactTools, a very nice guy I met a couple of weeks ago through a blogosphere connection. I'll bet others are blogging too, I just haven't come across them yet. Mike was kind enough to invite me to see the TT HQ (with pool table! plus bird's eye view of the World Trade Center site) and we talked blogging for a bit. It's evident from his blog and the conversation that he's excited about the job and the opportunities ahead.

I don't mean to give you a lot of rah-rah here. But for an old-timer like me (hit my 19th anniversary here last week, April 25), it's energizing to meet people who see the potential of the Web as a tool for communicating, sharing ideas and experiences, and building relationships. Also a nice change of pace for me to talk about another one of our businesses; NYSE Euronext is a multi-product company, this blog is evolving to reflect that, and NYSE TransactTools is part of that mix. Welcome, folks.

A couple of other links today:

Reg NMS Should Be Scrapped: Atkins: Outspoken Securities and Exchange Commission member Paul Atkins is extending his critique of recent reform initiatives to one of the industry's most significant current compliance concerns: Regulation National Market System (NMS). Atkins faults the commission on both procedural grounds and for going too far in micromanaging some aspects of market operations. Reg NMS "represents a massive regulatory intrusion into our security trading markets that was completely unwarranted, given the lack of evidence of market failure and the availability of substantially less intrusive means to achieve the regulatory goals," Atkins said in a speech to the Securities Industry & Financial Markets Association (Sifma) annual operations conference in Kissimmee, Fla. (Securities Industry News)

Today in NYSE History:
01 May 1975 "Mayday" - Negotiated commission rates went into effect for all stock transactions. (nyse.com) [At the time, this event was widely believed to portend "the end of the world as wel know it;" instead, it was more like the beginning.-- RP]

Tags: New York Stock Exchange, Hybrid Market, NYSE, NYSE Euronext, NYX, trading, stock market, NYSE TransactTools, SEC, NMS, Mayday