072 Exchange Invest Weekly Podcast November 20. 2020

Transcript   In the business of bourses and market structure this week,  ISS: the Weimer Republic moving forward at last, not moving forward. ASX spends its week in a technology fiasco.  My name is Patrick L. Young. Welcome to the bourse business, weekly digest. It's the Exchange Invest Weekly Podcast.   On one day opening EI 1916 this week, I mentioned the year when Tristan Tzara apparently found the Dadaist movement.  No sooner was that out than the ASX demonstrated their latest feat: Of TechnoDadaism. The Dadaist movement was a collective of artists who rejected the logic  of contemporary capitalist society, preferring to express nonsense, irrationality and anti bourgeois protest in their works. ASX have managed to demonstrate most of the clear concepts of the Dadaist movement through what amounts to TechnoDada, is inflicting all manner of closers, shutdowns, and tech legal problems through their stock. During the course of the last week where it required hackers to take down the New Zealand stock exchange, their antipodean neighbors did much more damage to their market, left all to their own initiative. ASX have it seems ambition, not the dizzying tech ambition of previous ASX generations who closed a major exchange floor ahead of the Vogue for the rest of the world.   The past week has suggested they are not merely content to be stewards of the biggest stuff up in settlements since the LSE’s stillborn TAURUS, but rather they now have ambitions to manage to screw up the entire technology stack of the market structure that is an Australian market monopoly. To which end the anguish of Chi-X and other professional intermediaries and competitors in the Australian financial market space has been measured, but heartfelt all the same. Even ACIC. Traditionally, the protector of the Australian stock exchange ended up getting annoyed, albeit they finished the week around a level three on a one to 10 scale where the reaction from a better regulator would surely have been a solid 15 plus and rising. It was so acute that if ASX management are not careful, they may soon have to be held responsible for their actions. Ultimately, one thing 2020 has exposed is how the “monopoly milkers” have a limited life span in the parish as has been long anticipated within the pixels of exchange invest Chicago Mercantile Exchange is now beholden to third parties for content development while incapable of attending to flaws within their portfolio. But apparently their South Wacker reception refurbishment is looking very Martha Stewart living. Likewise ASX has ridden the monopoly tread for a decade and more with zero foresight. The days of easy cream are long gone. The wheels are now tumbling off into the undergrowth of the ASX technology stack and that's leaving the chassis becalmed in the Bush. Sydney is in danger of being left a wilderness where financial markets once thrived in the early digital edge, ASX no longer engenders confidence that they are capable of running a monopoly for the benefit of stakeholders and shareholders alike. It's time for an outbreak of government intervention and Canberra should react to immediately clearing and settlement choice must be enabled for Australian investors.   Now the umbilical cord between ASX and the state, invalid since it moved to private ownership decades ago must be cut so that private endeavors can flourish against wh...