time we have a market that’s dominated by electronic a algorithmic trading.they look at news headlines, programmed to read these wordsancause a selloff, perhaps, and high-frequency traders,perhaps, exacerbate everything looking at that and hitting thesell button and then you have a giant problem, right? right. look, we’ve gone from a market designed to raise capital to support new businesses to a platform designed for algorithmic traders and hackers. we don’t talk about new companiesing public andour excitement there. we talk about what’s happening at the cboe and what’s going to happen with the software. we talk about will there even be bids because of high frequency trading when news comes out? there’s so many problems with where the market is today because the market doesn’t know what business it’s in. it literally is no longer in the business of providing capital for companies to grow and that’s a huge problem. well, clearly the markets are in the business of expanding technology and the growing role that it is and always will and will play down the road even more of a role in the way stocks are trading. there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. what’s the solution? well, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle in a lot of ways. because there is no real reason to have algorithmic trading at all. if we’re a market designed forinvestors to come in and invest in companies and watch forgrowth in those companies, you don’t need millisecond trading,that adds no value whatsoever. and we saw the problems, where the advocates of high-frequency trading will come in and tell you they add liquidity and volume. no, they don’t. they just add transactions. and when there’s an issue, they don’t hold positions, they don’t hold positions for minutes let alone days.and so we saw all the bids disappear with the twitter hack.we’ve seen it happen in other situations. and it’s going to happen again and again and again. look at this way, scott.what’s going to happen if there’s a real event? and something bad does happen? do you really think that there’s going to be any bids at all? and are there — is there a process for us to even introduce bids to try to put a bottom at the market? all we have are circuit breakers we hope will work. and after the circuit breakers, what happens?
we talk about will there even be bids because of high frequency trading when news comes out? there’s so many problems with where the market is today because the market doesn’t know what business it’s in. it literally is no longer in the business of providing capital for companies to grow and that’s a huge problem. well, clearly the markets are in the business of expanding technology and the growing role that it is and always will and will play down the road even more of a role in the way stocks are trading. there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. what’s the solution? well, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle in a lot of ways. because there is no real reason to have algorithmic trading at all. if we’re a market designed for investors to come in and invest in companies and watch for growth in those companies, you don’t need millisecond trading, that adds no value whatsoever. and we saw the problems, where the advocates of high-frequency trading will come in and tell you they add liquidity and volume. no, they don’t. they just add transactions. and when there’s an issue, they don’t hold positions, they don’t hold positions for minutes let alone days. and so we saw all the bids disappear with the twitter hack. we’ve seen it happen in other situations. and it’s going to happen again and again and again. look at this way, scott. what’s going to happen if there’s a real event? and something bad does happen? do you really think that there’s going to be any bids at all? and are there — is there a process for us to even introduce bids to try to put a bottom at the market? all we have are circuit breakers we hope will work. and after the circuit breakers, what happens? mark, it’s steve weiss, i agree with you 1,000%. and the high frequency traders actually suck liquidity out of the market and scare people away from it. what i struggle with is where do you draw the line. they take it to the furthest degree. then you have all of these day traders, many of you stood at home who stood for quarters and halves, they’re also there playing around, not cating capital, not driving the market as it’s intended to do. so where do you draw the line on that? well, first, i mean you’ve got to look at what is the business of the market? and then you’ve got to ha the — the regulatory agencies come in and start saying, look, let’s get back to what we’re here to do and that’s to create capital and to invest capital in companies. and you can say, look, you have to hold a position for an hour, two hours, and tt changes the game right there because once you get away from instantaneous algorithmic trading, the whole market changes, all the opportunities change. look at the fact tthe new york stock exchange is being sold and all these exchanges are going through mergers. their revenues are being driven by transactions, transactions, transactions. long gone are the days where they’re out there looking for new companies to bring on, to go public, to create listings. i mean, it’s — there’s so many downstream problems beyond just the fact that there’s no such thing as perfect software. i mean we haven’t even gotten into the discussion that the only certainty about introducing new software at exchanges and the only certaintybout having to upgrade algorithms and integrate them into software, the only certainty is you’re going to have problems. there’s no such thing as perfect software. i don’t want to gloss over this by any stretch. we’ve put up a graphic that shows in part some of your solutions. one thing you say is that trades should be taxed that aren’t heldfor a
