If you want to gauge the strength of a movement you have to see how its devotees perform in either bad weather or after its protest has been violently broken up by the police.
Judging by a quick pass through Zuccotti Park, the site of the Occupy Wall Street movement two years ago, there was not much passion to behold. Instead of large protesting masses that once choked sidewalks and traffic and filed the air with whistles and drums, this morning was perhaps two dozen of the usual suspects. Most of those present were twenty-somethings dressed in Hot Topic protest gear with a sprinkling of older gray-haired protesters awaiting the hippie rapture. The signs protesting Wall Street, capitalism, corporate America and the bailout had to compete with signs urging the US to not drop bombs on Syria.
One pair of white youths struggled to keep an upside down American flag with anti-war sentiments spray-pained on the stars and stripes from flying away in the blustery September winds. One passerby wearing a crisp white shirt and tie and sporting a crew cut yelled at the protesters, “Respect the flag, that’s a distress call!”
The protesters shot back with, “We are in distress!”
Across the street at the headquarters for old line Wall Street firm Brown Brothers Harriman – founded by an ancestor of the Bush family – another crowd was prepping their march down Broadway. This line-up boasted a few children in strollers, older folks, some pierced youths, and a drummer and trombonist with some high school-level music skills. “When the Saints Go Marching In” never sounded so wan.
The roughly three dozen protesters held aloft signs that appeared to be topic tags from a web site or talking points aimed at the banks and corporations in general – disregard our human dignity, ecological irresponsibility, suppression of dissent, etc.
Has the Occupy Wall Street Movement lost its steam? It appears so. And this can have a big impact on trading firms and their traders.
If the protesters no longer have the juice to raise irate crowds and gain the attention of lawmakers, regulators and the media, then the drive to expand capital market rules beyond 2010’s Dodd-Frank Act might have shriveled like last week’s fresh produce.
Perhaps protest fatigue could lead to new regulation fatigue.
The National Stock Exchange, in a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission last week, petitioned the regulator to disapprove a proposal by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority to dun ECNs for the upgrade of the Alternative Display Facility, or ADF.
FINRA has asked its ECN members to pony up $250,000 or $500,000 to help pay for the cost of rehabilitating its 11-year old ADF. The ECNs want an operational ADF—it is currently not functioning—so they can quote there. Today, they quote on the NSX.
Under the proposal, if the ECNs invest in the upgrade of the ADF, and also commit to quoting on it, FINRA will reimburse them with the market data revenues it receives.
The NSX calls the charges unreasonable and the whole scheme a burden on competition—specifically the NSX.
“The ADF proposal requires members to send 75 percent of their quotes and trades to FINRA,” David Harris, NSX chairman and chief executive officer, told the SEC in the letter. “This unprecedented requirement is a burden on competition for any self-regulatory organization that is seeking to offer ECN quote display, and is not necessary and appropriate.”
ECNs quote on NSX and Nasdaq. NSX offers a popular order delivery service that sends incoming orders to ECNs that are quoting on NSX for a fill or reject.The ECN has less than a millisecond to respond.
This year, however, the NSX won SEC approval to allow its customers to trade against only those quotes that can be filled immediately if they choose. That has upset the ECNs as it means their quotes can be bypassed.
Citigroup’s Lava Trading is the largest ECN. Credit Suisse and Bloomberg Tradebook also operate ECNs.
Broker-dealer Weeden & Co. today announced major improvements to its electronic product offering, including algorithms and infrastructure.
To its CloseIQ Strategy which is designed to take advantage of the increased volume trading into and on the close, it added real-time closing volume prediction and price sensitivity controls to take advantage of trading opportunities, as well as the option to expose orders to Weeden’s Closing Cross.
To its “Ghost” strategy which is designed to patiently work an order utilizing the price action of the security as the primary driver for execution speed, it added a dynamic “fair pricing” calculation that is intended to mitigate adverse selection.
To its VWAPIQ Strategy, it added, among other things, more granular VWAP curves to improve trading around the open and close. Weeden is also utilizing short term signals for more effective routing and has built a new low-latency trading infrastructure.
“There is a perception that algorithms are the same,” said David Margulies, Weeden’s head of electronic products. “We have never believed that our strategies have become commodities. With our ongoing enhancements and our willingness to be completely transparent with our clients, we offer quantifiably differentiated products.”
Axiom Capital Management, a New York brokerage serving individuals and institutions, hired three former Pulse Trading equity traders. Joining are Hal Smolanoff as head of equity trading, Ethan Vickery, and Grant Rosenblum. Smolanoff was previously with State Street Global Markets, a firm he joined after it acquired Pulse Trading in 2011. Smolanoff was one of the original members of Pulse’s New York team. Vickery also joined from State Street. Vickery spent about eight years at Pulse and State Street. Rosenblum joined from Global Arena Capital Corp., a retail brokerage. He also spent nearly two years at Pulse.
Veteran market making executive Ed Coughlin joined the execution services department of Nasdaq OMX Group, where he has responsibility for the exchange operator’s cash equities and options markets. Coughlin spent 17 years at wholesaler Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities until that firm shut down in 2009. He then spent the next two years at Surge Trading as head of automated market making.
Sean Maloney joined Alabama’s Sterne, Agee & Leach in the firm’s Boston office as a sales trader. Maloney previously held a similar position at Knight Capital Group for 10 years.
Electronic trading veteran Stephen Blatney joined bond brokers KGS Alpha in New York as an equity trading executive. Blatney was most recently with PE Source, a joint venture between private shares research shop Greencrest Capital Management and Knight Capital Group. Before that Blatney spent four years as head of electronic trading at now-defunct Thomas Weisel Partners.
Industry veteran Steven Lewis joined Waddell & Reed as a financial advisor in one of the investment management firm’s suburban Salt Lake City offices. He also sells insurance for various firms. Lewis was previously a sales trader in New York for about 15 years at SEB Enskilda. He began his career as a market maker in Australian stocks at the London Stock Exchange in 1972.
Fidelity Institutional, which includes National Financial’s clearing operations, is going to consolidate its technology in an effort to garner more clearing and custody business.
“Through our ongoing dialogue with clients, we recognized that we could deliver a deeper level of engagement in the custody and clearing industry by better leveraging our scale and breadth of expertise,” said Gerard McGraw, president of Fidelity Institutional.
McGraw and the leaders of Fidelity’s custody and clearing units-Michael Durbin, president of Fidelity Institutional Wealth Services, and Sanjiv Mirchandani, president of National Financial-will oversee a new organizational structure that recognizes that business models in the financial advice industry are converging, the company officials said.
“Both IWS and National Financial are serving bank clients, often the same client,” Durbin explained. A key goal of the realignment is to create service teams with professionals from both the custodian and clearing units to provide bank clients with more integrated services, he added.
“Increasingly, clients are asking for integrated and superior technology that cuts across various segments,” Mirchandani said.
“We are a diverse company,” added McGraw, “and it is important that we are aligned to consistently bring our clients both our broad industry perspective as well as our specific business model expertise.”
The changes are part of a number of corporate structure changes designed to deliver comprehensive services in both money management and clearing/custody service. Mirchandani added that the change makes sense for clearing, custody and IWS, the registered investment advisor operations. Mirchandani said the consolidation will change little in the short term because the different platforms now have interoperability. However, over “the long term, as the platforms combine, it will easier to use future components across a common platform.
(Bloomberg) — U.S. securities regulators told stock exchanges to collaborate on making markets more resilient, an attempt to prevent another disruption like Nasdaq OMX Group Inc.’s three-hour halt last month.
After Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Jo White’s meeting with the top executives of the nation’s stock and options markets in Washington Thursday, the regulator said it asked them to “identify a series of concrete measures designed to address specific areas where the robustness and resilience of market systems can be improved.” NYSE Euronext Chief Executive Officer Duncan Niederauer said they have 60 days to respond.
White scheduled the gathering after Nasdaq’s securities information processor, a system for distributing stock quotes, failed on Aug. 22, prompting a three-hour trading halt for thousands of companies. The SEC asked exchanges to develop plans to bolster the SIPs run by Nasdaq and NYSE Euronext, review other potential points of failure, and evaluate rules for canceling transactions and restarting trading after halts.
“Our homework assignments are clear, they require collaboration and we’ve got 60 days,” Niederauer said in Washington after the meeting.
In the SEC’s statement, White said she emphasized the need for exchanges to work together on the issues she identified. Niederauer and CBOE Holdings Inc. Chairman William Brodsky both characterized the talks as “constructive” during interviews in Washington.
‘Great Job’
“I thought she did a great job,” Brodsky said. “We’re going to cooperate together, and I think it is overall a very positive thing.”
Meeting participants included representatives from the U.S. stock and options exchanges, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. and Options Clearing Corp. Nasdaq’s computers were flooded Aug. 22 with data from NYSE Arca, a rival exchange, revealing a bug in Nasdaq’s SIP software that disabled systems that should have prevented the malfunction from snowballing.
Exchanges were told today to “provide comprehensive action plans that address the standards necessary to establish highly resilient and robust systems for the securities information processors,” the SEC said in a statement today. That includes “testing standards and disclosure protocols.”
Kill Switches
The SEC asked market operators to figure out how to implement “kill switches” that shut trading following a technology breakdown.
Gary Katz, the CEO of Deutsche Boerse AG’s International Securities Exchange, said the most important outcome of the meeting could be the focus on addressing single points of failure, where one computer bug or mistake paralyzes the entire market.
“These are areas where redudancy would help,” he said. “And by looking at that with a keen eye to recognizing that the industry and the technology continues to evolve, you can make a habit of it, something that’s regularly done.”
White also told exchanges to work on coming up with uniform rules for how to handle erroneous trades in the options market. That followed errant options trades by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. on Aug. 20, which resulted in different markets applying different standards to cancellations.
Tony McCormick, the CEO of BOX Options Exchange LLC, said there was acknowledgment in the meeting that there are too many variations in rules between the exchanges.
“There was a general feeling that from the standpoint of end users, particularly sophisticated end users that are providing liquidity and are affected more directly, you need to have a standardization around that so everybody understands what the landscape is and how these things are treated,” he said.
Brokerages must prepare for increasing amounts of cyber crime attacks.
Cyber-fraud experts and clearing industry officials say that when cyber-crime happens, the problem is primarily the responsibility of the financial institution involved. The broker-dealer is usually socked with most of the costs. It also has to face the potential destruction of a business by malicious hackers, according to fraud experts.
So the financial services industry has become a preferred target of cyber-criminals, say executives of clearing brokerages that are studying the issue.
First Clearing and others in the financial services industry are issuing these warnings. They are saying that cyber-crime is becoming a massive threat to brokerages, as well as to exchanges and, indeed, the entire financial services industry. In a white paper, First Clearing says there were around $388 billion in cyber-fraud losses in 2011. And that makes cyber-crime “larger than the global markets in marijuana, cocaine and heroin combined,” according to the paper, titled “Getting Serious About Cyber Risk.”
The report calls for firms to adopt the “four pillars” of risk management. These services, which First Clearing and others are offering, include educational support, consulting, educational events and technology tools to stop cyber fraud.
The report also calls for brokerages to candidly evaluate their vulnerabilities and how they will respond to hackers’ attacks.
“The best, most effective way to measure or implement an appropriate security posture,” the report says, “is to undertake a guided third-party risk assessment. If an attacker were probing your defenses today, are you comfortable you would even know?”
FINANCIAL SERVICES TARGETED
Cyber-crime constitutes about half of all the fraud reported in the financial services sector, according to a 2012 worldwide survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers UK. About 44 percent of financial fraud is cyber-fraud, according to the survey, which had around 4,400 respondents.
“It is scary. It’s hard to look at those facts and not have some level of concern,” said Chris Valenti, who coordinates the Information Service Initiative for First Clearing.
“The risk is urgent for all businesses,” added First Clearing chief risk and quality officer Al Caiazzo.
Valenti said that part of the problem is that it is much easier to attack a system than to defend. “However, it is not impossible. Defending is a layered thing. It is not just throwing up one big wall,” he said.
One critical element of defense is convincing the industry of the seriousness of the problem, especially smaller and midsize brokerages, industry experts say. Indeed, one surprising result of the PwC UK poll is that about half of the senior executives surveyed don’t know if cyber-fraud is a problem at their firm.
Acknowledging the potential risk is critical, industry experts say.
“We believe what firms must do is take steps to understand what their risks are and understand how much ability they have to absorb those risks,” Caiazzo said. He said the financial services industry is vulnerable, the same as any other, because it is increasingly depending on technology to conduct business.
The problem is growing and can take various forms.
One is an attack on a public network. For instance, hackers might be successful in denying some form of public service. This affects the public Internet channel. An example of this happened in Hong Kong, when trading in certain securities was suspended because the site that publishes official news about securities was under attack, said Michael Leibrock, vice president of systemic risk at the Depository Trust and Clearing Corp. In this case, Leibrock said, the actual trading and matching engines continued to operate because most of the core functions, such as clearing and trading, happen on separate private network.
However, more destructive serious attacks, he added, have the potential to affect the normal market infrastructure. These can be systemic attacks.
“These attacks occur inside the security perimeter of the exchanges or the market infrastructure, while the others are happening at the market edge,” Leibrock said. There have been a lot of the first kind of attacks-the denial-of-service kind-recently, and almost none of the latter.
The securities industry, or at least the biggest firms, is taking the problem more seriously. Cyber-crime has been the focus of big brokerages banding together, along with the industry utility, the DTCC. Yet technologist Bruce Schneier warns that cyber-criminals are relentless.
“History has taught us never underestimate the amount of money, time and effort someone will expend to thwart a security system. It’s always better to assume the worst,” said Schneier, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.
Financial cyber-fraud has several dangerous aspects that threaten clearing brokerages as much as low volumes and low interest rates. Many firms aren’t even aware of the problem, industry observers say, which often assumes the form of unauthorized wire transfers. Such illegal transfers average $183,000.
FINRA recently warned against this type of fraud. It told firms to take additional steps to ensure that a wire transfer is legitimate. But that would mean adding some manual steps and not relying solely on electronic communications during the transfer. Ironically, this suggestion to use more manual instructions comes at a time when the industry is trying to become more electronic-a kind of catch-22 for the brokerage business.
And the problem of cyber-fraud isn’t limited to firms. Big exchanges that clearing firms use are also under attack. For example, about half of exchanges reported experiencing a cyber-attack in the past year, according to a survey conducted by the Committee on Payment and Settlement Systems/Technical Committee of the International Organization of Securities Commissions.
The problem is also legal. Most of the legal sanctions in have not been effective enough to prevent these attacks, according to a DTCC report, “A White Paper to the Industry on Systemic Risk.”
According to the DTCC paper, exchanges view “cyber crime in the securities markets as a potential risk, citing the possibility of massive and financial and reputational impact.”
A PRIORITY
The clearing industry’s utility says it is making a fight against cyber fraud a priority. For example, it is working with firms as well as the United States Department of the Treasury and the United States Department of Homeland Security to define “critical infrastructure” and have closer cooperation between the federal government and key industry participants.
DTCC officials also warn that the cyber fraud threat will increase in the next few years and become more sophisticated. One reason why these attacks will be more challenging and frequent, DTCC officials say in echoing others in the industry, is that it is easy to hide in cyberspace.
“Attackers benefit from their anonymity and the lack of attribution as well as their existence outside U.S. and E.U. (European Union) jurisdictional boundaries, all of which minimize the probability of prosecution,” according to the DTCC White Paper.
“Due to the asymmetric nature of the Internet,” the paper continued, “it is very inexpensive for an attacker to launch an attack and very expensive for the defender to defend against those attacks.”
Indeed, it could be very expensive for the financial institution, the site of choice for most hackers. That’s because the institution is usually on the hook.
And when the problem happens, it is mainly the financial institution’s to deal with, according to regulators.
FDIC Regulation E (Sec. 205.6) limits how much a client will have to pay in the case of cyber-fraud through unauthorized transfers. If a client notifies the brokerages within 48 hours, the client is liable for only $50 of losses. After 48 hours, the client liability is $500. The rest of the liability belongs to the financial institution. The institution, the First Clearing paper notes, could become the biggest victim of cyber-fraud.
“Although consumers are well protected, corporations are not. When it comes to commercial liability, Regulation E sets no limits,” the First Clearing report says.
“Should one of your clients become the victim of cyber fraud, your financial institution is expected to absorb the losses in excess of the consumer’s protection limits,” the report cautions.
INSURANCE PROTECTION?
Some firms try to protect themselves by carrying insurance against cyber-fraud. But, said one clearing industry executive who didn’t want to be quoted by name, “firms can’t collect on these policies unless they can demonstrate they had taken the right steps to protect against the problem.”
What are firms to do?
First, one must try to understand the cyber-criminal/hacker (See Sidebar “How to Defend Against Cyber Fraud”). Second, firms should think differently about how they defend themselves from cyber-attacks, says First Clearing’s Valenti. The firm should construct layers of protection, where one layer can compensate for the problems of another.
“When people think of defense, they think of a great wall, and that’s all they can do. It should be a series of layers,” Valenti said. These might include policies, procedures and various technologies that “can complement each other.”
This “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” strategy is designed to slow down hackers, so the chance of detection improves.
“This multifaceted defense,” Valenti added, “will mean it’s not impossible to stop cyber-fraud.”
And fraud expert Schneier also cautions that financial services executives should assume the worst: that the technology of fraud will continue to progress. In that case, he says, be prepared for a problem that will seem bigger than it is today.
“Give yourself a margin for error,” Schneier said. “Give yourself more security than you need today. When the unexpected happens, you’ll be glad you did.”
The Twittersphere lit up like a pinball machine late yesterday as the microblogging site announced – in a tweet, naturally – that it had filed for its initial public offering.
So far, the details are few yet noteworthy: Goldman Sachs will underwrite Twitter’s IPO and the social media site is keeping mum about its financials, thanks to the newly passed JOBS Act. Firms with revenue of less than $1 billion do not have to reveal its financial sheets until it starts its full marketing push before the shares are traded.
But there’s a burning issue that will have an impact on investors and traders alike: Will Twitter trade on Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange?
With its recent trading technology glitch that suspended trading of shares in mid-August, Nasdaq might not be the first choice for Twitter and its young team of tech-savvy owners. Also, the NYSE has a history of trading technology stocks and the NYSE’s systems did not screw up the Facebook IPO in May of 2012. That honor belongs to Nasdaq when the market maker’s systems could not handle the most hotly anticipated IPO since the Credit Crisis of 2008 and the dawn of Web 2.0. That faceplant also cost Nasdaq $10 million in fines once the dust settled and angry investors accused the market maker of losing them millions in potential profits.
As Traders Magazine reported yesterday, Mary Jo White of the Securities & Exchange Commission met with the leaders of the leading U.S. stock exchanges and ordered them to collaborate on ways to make their systems more resilient. According to news reports, Nasdaq CEO Bob Greifeld was 40 minutes late for the meeting with the SEC and his colleagues. That is not a vote of confidence for the CEO of the exchange that needs good news when it comes to its operations.
There is no word on which exchange Twitter will trade. But we can guess that the IT teams of Nasdaq – the men and women who keep the systems up and running – are getting a stern warning: Don’t mess this one up. And folks, say goodbye to your weekends. Instead of watching your kids’ soccer and football games you’ll be running trading drills until Twitter goes public.
Unless Twitter and Goldman Sachs give the rose to NYSE, of course.
(Bloomberg) — Exchange executives and securities regulators will discuss improvements in systems for distributing price data as they meet in Washington today in the latest attempt to strengthen the fragmented U.S. equity market.
Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Jo White plans to hold private talks with the chief executive officers of the 13 U.S. stock exchanges to discuss the Aug. 22 failure in Nasdaq OMX Group Inc.’s backup system for disseminating prices, which prompted a three-hour trading halt for thousands of companies.
The malfunction was the latest in a series of mishaps that have shaken confidence in computerized trading since May 6, 2010, when an algorithm briefly caused markets to erase about $862 billion in share value. The SEC expects Nasdaq and NYSE Euronext to explain that incident and coordinate with other exchange operators to prevent future occurrences.
“They are encouraging the exchanges to work together to make sure the systems are as redundant as possible,” said David A. Herron, chief executive officer of Chicago Stock Exchange Inc., who will attend the meeting. “I think the industry will step up and do the right thing.”
White, who was a Nasdaq Stock Market Inc. board member from 2002 to 2006, has said she will seek new protocols for breaking trades if a network fails and push to advance rules that would require exchanges to show trading can continue through natural disasters and programming glitches.
SEC Enforcement Co-Chief Andrew Ceresney, speaking yesterday at a Practicing Law Institute seminar in New York, said Nasdaq’s trading halt demonstrated the need for investigators to take a closer look at whether market participants have adequate policies and safeguards in place to keep up with the technology they use.
Snowballing Malfunction
Nasdaq’s computers were flooded Aug. 22 with data from NYSE Arca, a rival exchange, revealing a bug in Nasdaq’s software that disabled systems that should have prevented the malfunction from snowballing, according to a statement. The challenges were “clearly within the control of Nasdaq OMX,” the company said.
Nasdaq experienced another glitch with the system on Sept. 4. This time, the backup worked and the problem only lasted six minutes. The exchange said the data feed suffered a “hardware memory failure” that forced a switch to a backup.
The private meeting will focus new scrutiny on the price networks, known as securities information processors, that distribute stock prices to the public. The three SIPs for U.S. equity markets are run by Nasdaq and NYSE Euronext.
SIPs gather price data from each exchange, consolidate it, and then sell the information to brokers and other securities firms. All exchange participants share the revenue earned from selling the data, which is prescribed by an SEC rule.
Nasdaq’s recent failures underscore the risk of relying on a single system to disseminate market data. An SEC advisory committee recommended in 2001 that the commission encourage competition by opening up the market-data business to outside consolidators. The commission rejected that idea in a 2005 update of national-market system rules known as Regulation NMS.
‘Regulatory Mandate’
“This notion that people should pay for the quotes by regulatory mandate was back in a time when you needed mainframe computers and hundreds of millions of dollars to aggregate quotes and provide information to the public about security prices, but we haven’t needed that for 25 years,” said Harold S. Bradley, who served on the 2001 committee and is a former chief investment officer for the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. “So the SIP ends up being a choke point in a high- frequency trading world and an enormous source of revenue for the exchanges.”
A committee that oversees Nasdaq’s SIP proposed on Sept. 4 “short-term” actions to prevent future failures. The changes include terminating a connection if the network detects an unusual surge in data traffic and increasing the frequency of stress testing.
Future Failures
The SEC meeting also will allow White and fellow regulators to explore how a rule proposed in March, known as Regulation SCI, may help prevent future failures of key exchange technology. The exchanges have resisted key sections of the proposal, saying it would cover too many systems and require them to report too much information.
The SEC also plans to discuss how a trading halt due to a SIP failure can be better communicated. Some exchanges had systems programmed to stop trading based on a message from the market-data networks. That message couldn’t be relayed by Nasdaq’s SIP after it went down on Aug. 22.
BLOG: Anemic Turnout Greets Occupy Wall Street’s 2nd Anniversary
If you want to gauge the strength of a movement you have to see how its devotees perform in either bad weather or after its protest has been violently broken up by the police.
Judging by a quick pass through Zuccotti Park, the site of the Occupy Wall Street movement two years ago, there was not much passion to behold. Instead of large protesting masses that once choked sidewalks and traffic and filed the air with whistles and drums, this morning was perhaps two dozen of the usual suspects. Most of those present were twenty-somethings dressed in Hot Topic protest gear with a sprinkling of older gray-haired protesters awaiting the hippie rapture. The signs protesting Wall Street, capitalism, corporate America and the bailout had to compete with signs urging the US to not drop bombs on Syria.
One pair of white youths struggled to keep an upside down American flag with anti-war sentiments spray-pained on the stars and stripes from flying away in the blustery September winds. One passerby wearing a crisp white shirt and tie and sporting a crew cut yelled at the protesters, “Respect the flag, that’s a distress call!”
The protesters shot back with, “We are in distress!”
Across the street at the headquarters for old line Wall Street firm Brown Brothers Harriman – founded by an ancestor of the Bush family – another crowd was prepping their march down Broadway. This line-up boasted a few children in strollers, older folks, some pierced youths, and a drummer and trombonist with some high school-level music skills. “When the Saints Go Marching In” never sounded so wan.
The roughly three dozen protesters held aloft signs that appeared to be topic tags from a web site or talking points aimed at the banks and corporations in general – disregard our human dignity, ecological irresponsibility, suppression of dissent, etc.
Has the Occupy Wall Street Movement lost its steam? It appears so. And this can have a big impact on trading firms and their traders.
If the protesters no longer have the juice to raise irate crowds and gain the attention of lawmakers, regulators and the media, then the drive to expand capital market rules beyond 2010’s Dodd-Frank Act might have shriveled like last week’s fresh produce.
Perhaps protest fatigue could lead to new regulation fatigue.