Das dürfte aber wohl mit der Diskussion um die Einführung des...

verfasst von Helmut, 23.10.2003, 16:24

-->elektronischen Handels zusammenhängen. Hier eine gute Zusammenfassung der aktuellen Diskussion:

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Dispute on the trading floor

Changes likely after recent debate on workings of NYSE

By Ben White And Kathleen Day
THE WASHINGTON POST

Oct. 21 — Turmoil at the New York Stock Exchange has ignited a fierce struggle among powerful Wall Street insiders about the structure of U.S. financial markets. The outcome could have profound consequences for the 85 million Americans who own stocks.

THE DEBATE ABOUT THE NYSE has simmered quietly for years, obscured by seemingly arcane discussions about the effectiveness of human traders handling the matching of buy and sell orders for billions of shares of stock and about the merits of securities industry self-regulation.
But the recent revelations of conflicts of interest and possible trading abuses at the 211-year-old icon of U.S. capitalism have highlighted fundamental questions and pushed them to the fore of public debate: Do investors get the fairest prices for the stocks they buy and sell? Are investors adequately protected from abuse by market professionals? Do regulations hamper competition among markets that could benefit investors? And should stock trading be handled entirely by computers, or is there still a role for human intervention?
After years of studies, hearings and endless debate — and with a new interim NYSE chairman, John S. Reed, and a new head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, William H. Donaldson, who have vowed to set things right — a transformation now appears to be at hand. Securities industry experts say the outcome could have as much impact on how stock is bought and sold as the Depression-era laws that created the SEC and brought the world of Wall Street under government oversight for the first time.
“If the New York Stock Exchange gets reformed, which I think is a pretty good bet right now, this is on a par with the reforms of 1933 and 1934,” said Charles R. Geisst, a Wall Street historian and professor at Manhattan College.

NYSE SUPREMACY SEEN UNDER THREAT

If the changes go as far as they could, the NYSE’s unquestioned dominance of the financial markets and clubby atmosphere could become relics of the past. And its chaotic trading floor, with its screaming brokers and piles of discarded paper, could be replaced by a more antiseptic environment marked by the quiet whir and blinking lights of powerful computers.
If that happens, some people foresee the emergence of a seamlessly efficient market where investors, both big and small, get the best prices and quickest trade execution. Others envision a deeply fractured and volatile marketplace with stocks trading on an ever-growing number of networks. With no single dominant market, it could be difficult for investors to find the best price or a partner to take the other side of a transaction in a thinly traded stock.
Major players, including Wall Street’s investment-banking houses, big mutual and pension funds, and upstart electronic trading networks, have taken positions reflecting their own interests.
Executives at Wall Street investment houses for the most part do not care whether the human-run NYSE trading floor stays or goes as long as the public continues to buy and sell stocks and the market thrives. But big pension and mutual funds, for the most part, say they would not miss the NYSE floor because they believe the traders there increase costs they must pass on to their investors. They want to trade large blocks of stock as quickly as possible, and they complain that the NYSE rules slow them down. But because they trade in such heavy volume, they also need a marketplace with deep liquidity, meaning one in which they can trade hundreds of thousands of shares in block without moving stock prices too much.
“The status quo is unacceptable,” said Annette Nazareth, head of market regulation at the SEC, which will oversee whatever new structure emerges. “The foundations are starting to crumble.”

GRASSO SCANDAL REVEALED TROUBLES

That crumbling became visible to the general public last month when the NYSE disclosed that it had awarded Dick Grasso a deferred compensation package worth $187.5 million, most of it covering his eight years as chairman and CEO. That pay was approved in part by executives from firms the NYSE regulates.
Critics of the exchange, led by pension fund officials from states such as California and New York, who manage hundreds of billions of dollars in investments, seized on Grasso’s pay to make the case that the NYSE structure is rife with conflicts of interest that compromise its ability to serve investors.
“The whole Grasso compensation revelation threw a spotlight on the exchange and what it does and how it does it,” said Lawrence J. White, a professor of economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business.
At the heart of the debate are two types of issues.
One cluster centers on the fundamental role of the exchange, including the potential conflict between its duty to try to find the best deal for investors and its desire to maximize profits for the brokerage houses and other securities traders that are its members. The NYSE describes itself as a private company with a public purpose. It is those dual roles, of running a for-profit business on the one hand and policing itself to ensure investors are protected on the other, that often run counter to each other, critics of the exchange say, with individual investors often on the losing end.
Officials at pension and mutual funds, as well as the NYSE’s competitors, want to see the exchange stripped of its authority to regulate its member firms. They also want to see a more independent board that includes representatives from Wall Street’s “buy side,” the pension funds, mutual funds and individual investors that purchase shares sold by brokerage houses.
Reed, the former Citigroup co-chief executive who agreed to serve as interim NYSE chairman after Grasso resigned, has staked out a middle ground. Sources familiar with Reed’s thinking say he will present a plan in less than two weeks to dramatically reduce the size of the 27-member NYSE board and remove from it executives at regulated firms.
One option under consideration is the creation of two separate boards, one filled with directors from outside the industry to oversee regulation and a second one to oversee the NYSE’s business operations. Both boards would report to the chairman. Competitors scoff at this structure, saying it simply moves the conflict to the top of the chain of command.

POWERFUL INTERESTS RESISTING CHANGE

Reed has complained that “powerful interests” at the exchange are resisting change. He told reporters last week that some people at the exchange just want him to “spray some perfume around” to satisfy the SEC and Congress and then leave. Reed has not named the interests, but one obvious group is the “specialist” firms that own seats on the exchange and conduct trading in individual stocks. Specialists fear that a newly independent board would not protect their interests.
Several executives at Wall Street brokerage firms have said they would embrace an entirely independent board. But they have also said privately that they fear a zealous new regulatory regime, either at the exchange or outside it. The executives, however, say their firms will support any reforms that help restore investor trust and keep people buying stocks, whether through the NYSE or through other markets.
Although Reed has disappointed some reformers by saying he believes the NYSE should retain its dual role, he and other defenders of the NYSE’s regulatory unit say the exchange is in the best position to monitor brokers and traders to make sure they are serving investors. Stripping regulation away from the NYSE will make it easier, not harder, for market professionals to cheat investors, they argue.
The debate over self-regulation took on added significance last week when the NYSE and the SEC signaled that they had found widespread abuses by the five biggest specialist firms. The alleged abuses include specialists’ intervening in stock trades to make money for themselves at the expense of investors. NYSE and SEC officials say the abuses, covering a three-year period, could have cost investors $150 million or more, a figure the specialists dispute.
The second set of issues on reforming the stock exchange involves operational questions, including the role of the specialists. In an age when trading has become largely automated, the specialists retain a role developed in another era. They benefit from having access to buy and sell offers before competitors do. In exchange, they are charged with keeping markets liquid by stepping in to buy or sell any NYSE-listed stock when few other buyers or sellers are available. But critics say technology can more easily — and more fairly — handle volume trades than human beings can. Competitors eager to offer trading services more quickly and less expensively want the SEC to change the rules so the NYSE no longer has federally mandated advantages.
The leading proponents of this argument are electronic trading networks such as Instinet. The electronic networks disseminate information about pending orders in their systems and anonymously match buyers and sellers with no human intervention. In some ways, they are like the Nasdaq Stock Market. But the Nasdaq conducts electronic trading by displaying buy and sell prices offered by member “market makers,” largely banks and brokerage firms. The Nasdaq conducts trading in both “over-the-counter” stocks, those that do not meet the criteria for listing on a national exchange, and its own listed companies.

TRADE-THROUGH RULE DISPUTED

The electronic networks say the regulation that most blatantly protects the NYSE from competition is the SEC’s “trade-through” rule, which requires that stock orders be routed through the market quoting the best price. Electronic-market executives say that while the NYSE often quotes the best price, its system is so slow that by the time stock orders are filled, the price has changed. NYSE executives defend the trade-through rule, saying that in most instances it works. They say they have adopted new technology that processes orders much faster, and in many instances without human intervention. They acknowledge, however, that they still have work to do to make their market faster.
The NYSE executives also argue that eliminating the trade-through rule would create greater market “fragmentation,” in which stock orders are spread over many different markets, making it harder for investors to get the best prices and increasing market volatility. SEC officials say they, too, worry about fragmentation but they don’t agree that getting rid of rules favoring specialists would necessarily lead to that.
The biggest argument in favor of the specialists is that they help keep the market on an even keel during a crisis.
Critics of the exchange argue that it is not always so. Samuel L. Hayes, a Harvard Business School professor emeritus who sits on boards at several mutual fund companies, said the crash of October 1987, in which the Dow Jones industrial average lost 508 points, or 22.6 percent of its value, is a prime example.
After the crash it was found that “a number of specialists simply stepped out of the way of the speeding train rather than act as a buffer as they are obligated to do,” Hayes said.
Supporters of the NYSE model argue that specialists often do cushion what would otherwise be bigger market declines. And they say that in 1987 specialists were at least on the floor and available, while Nasdaq market makers were not even picking up their phones to take trading orders.
Michael LaBranche, chief executive of the specialist firm LaBranche and Co., said in a speech on Friday that he did not think any reforms approved by the SEC would shut down the floor because specialists add value for investors by increasing liquidity in stock trades and dampening volatility.
“The first time I heard we were going out of business was the first day I stepped on the NYSE floor in 1977,” he said. “But we changed and adapted and will continue to change.”

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

<ul> ~ Dispute on the trading floor</ul>

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gesamter Thread:

• Sitz-Crash an der NYSE! - dottore, 23.10.2003, 14:23
  • Re: Sitz-Crash an der NYSE! interessant - Cosa, 23.10.2003, 16:12
  • Das dürfte aber wohl mit der Diskussion um die Einführung des... - Helmut, 23.10.2003, 16:24
    • Re: Das dürfte aber wohl mit der Diskussion um die Einführung des... - dottore, 23.10.2003, 18:41
      • An der NASDAQ geht der Handel mit großen Stückzahlen ja... - Helmut, 23.10.2003, 19:38
  • Re: Sitz-Crash an der NYSE!... - Uwe, 23.10.2003, 17:15
    • Re: Danke, in der NYT war's etwas anders gezeichnet (sieht trotzdem mau aus) (owT) - dottore, 23.10.2003, 18:50
      • Re: Ja, aber nur in der Gestaltung.Werte sind anscheinend gleich (mit Diagramm) - Uwe, 23.10.2003, 20:40