076 Exchange Invest Weekly Podcast December 19 2020

Transcript My name is Patrick L. Young. Welcome to the bourse business weekly digest for the last time in 2020. It's the Exchange Invest Weekly podcast.  Good day, ladies and gentlemen, this is a very brief reduction of highlights amongst the key headlines from the week in market structure. All the analysis of the week’s, many events and happenings can be found in Exchange, Invest Daily subscriber newsletter, the unique guide to the bourse business sent daily to your inbox. More details at exchangeinvest.com. Affirm has postponed their initial public offering. The whole notion that companies might cancel IPO's because market pricing seems to be landing closer to Mars than Elon Musk has yet managed, amounts - like this sentence - to a somewhat tangled metaphor: whatever lies behind these cancellations, we do need to consider the reality of the IPO pricing fiasco. Last week, the SEC, frankly, blundered around the market data issue. I mean, it was only at the weekend. I began to appreciate that a cast member of a Kardashian reality show was not moonlighting as an SEC commissioner, but that still leaves a mystery of quite what some parties had in mind when they last week delivered somewhat emotive statements without much, indeed, any evidence that electronic markets, even in the SEC muddled NMS world. amount to some form of judge Dredd style dystopia.  In this curious - one might add contradictory to reality - vision of modern markets. The SIP resembles the forgotten Rustbelt desert gas station accompanied by wisps of spray blowing, almost in cadence with the moody background electric guitar riff.  Of course we could argue the forgotten Rustbelt element of our markets played out in Cushing, Oklahoma earlier this year, but that whole Farago appears to be simultaneously overseen and overlooked by another agency entirely of late.  Anyway, if you missed what some SEC commissioners may say about the SIP, it seems to fly in the face of the perfectly accurate data that hit my IBKR screen Friday without perceptible delay and all for frankly, a decent enough cost. Oddly enough, the SEC seems to have bulk imbibed the buy sell side Kool-Aid and believes everything ought to be ostensibly free in market data without stopping to wonder quite how the magic of digital market information gets from the data centers of New Jersey to the rest of the world. That the SIPs became a problem one may argue stems from the analogue creation of Reg NMS itself...But that's a box nobody wants to think outside of because the SEC made it themselves. As a derivatives person, I actually remain quite in awe of cash equity trading. A stupendously simple binary that has ultimately been rendered horribly complex by various vested interests. Anyway, amidst all of the frankly juvenile Hullabaloo from Washington DC. last week, I am minded to wonder. If these high handed Commissioners might be inclined to dismount their high horses and actually ponder the landscape of trading to address genuine gaping holes, as opposed to the imagined outrageous pricing in a parish where it's nickels and dimes for the exchanges, and nano cents for the analysts in Exchange Invest and always basis points, if not outright percentage points, for the banks, brokers, fund managers et al, to return to the top of this tale, the implication that IPOs are being withheld due to the - at best - utterly inept method of pricing stock offerings. That is surely seismic. I mean, shrewd...