SEC Reviewing Trading Practices After Shift to Automation
This article is for subscribers only.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is examining equity trading practices that gained dominance in the past decade amid a shift to automation, according to an official in the agency’s enforcement division.
Daniel Hawke, head of the market-abuse unit, said at an event yesterday that the SEC is looking into techniques such as co-location, in which exchanges let traders place computers close to the market’s systems to shave time off executions. He said other practices under examination include the rebates that venues pay to spur transactions, direct market access where brokers let investors send orders to venues themselves, and whether the types of orders exchanges offer are being misused.