‘Heavy Comment’
“It almost feels a little bit like, ‘Is this a tick pilot or a trade-at pilot?’” said Brett Redfearn, Americas head of market-structure strategy at JPMorgan, speaking at the same event as Masone and Luparello.
Opposition to the program isn’t new. The SEC’s Investor Advisory Committee voted 13-3 in January to urge the agency not to conduct the pilot program. The SEC went ahead anyway. Opponents including Fidelity Investments say investors will have to pay more to buy and sell shares of small companies.
“Getting it done this year would be pretty complicated,” SEC Commissioner Daniel Gallagher, a Republican, said last month at a conference in Washington. “My guess is we’ll get some pretty heavy comment on this thing, and it might buckle under its own weight.”