Tag Archives: maker-taker

best-execution

Best Execution Wack-A-Mole Aims at Wholesalers

When it comes to gauging best execution, that exercise is akin to a game of whack-a-mole when calculating in the role of wholesalers aka over-the-counter market-makers whose business model includes leveraging maker-taker rebate schemes. MarketsMuse credits below excerpted observations from TabbForum and courtesy of Stanislav Dolgopolov, Decimus Capital Markets, LLC

(TabbForum) Compliance with the duty of best execution is typically focused on customer-facing brokers, but the stringent standard of best execution may pop up several times in the transactional chain. One critical issue already getting—and deserving—more attention is the extent to which the duty of best execution applies to off-exchange market makers, commonly referred to as ‘wholesalers’ or ‘internalizers,’ and whether conflicts of interest are keeping them from meeting these obligations.

One illustration of potential conflicts of interest is monetization of maker-taker arrangements for certain types of orders – typically, nonmarketable limit orders – by off-exchange market makers through secondary routing, which may potentially come at the expense of execution quality, given that a substantial portion of orders directed to them consists of such orders. Furthermore, a typical major player in the wholesaling segment is in the spotlight to demonstrate the adequacy of execution within its affiliated dark pool(s), given a bevy of concerns, such as toxicity, slowness, or leakages of customer order information. Yet another consideration from the standpoint of the very definition of “best execution” is whether there are self-interested or otherwise avoidable delays counter to the requirement of prompt execution.

Finger-pointing in connection with achieving and maintaining execution quality is not necessarily an easy task. Compliance with the duty of best execution is typically focused on customer-facing brokers, as illustrated by the level of scrutiny of retail brokerages, including lawsuits, in connection with payment for order flow and maker-taker arrangements. At the same time, the stringent standard of best execution may pop up several times in the transactional chain. One critical issue already getting—and deserving—more attention is the extent to which the duty of best execution applies to off-exchange market makers, commonly referred to as “wholesalers” or “internalizers.”

This assumption of the duty of best execution may be rooted in contractual arrangements—sometimes called “order handling agreements”—between off-exchange market makers and customer-facing brokerage firms. Pursuant to the applicable agreement, an off-exchange market maker may in fact discharge agency-based functions in addition to trading in the principal capacity. By contrast, market making on securities exchanges has been “de-agentized” in the sense that designated market makers have been relieved of their traditional agent-like duties to investors. In fact, some order handling agreements specifically mention the best execution standard. Even when this standard is not spelled out, the scope of the applicable relationship is likely to bind that off-exchange market maker as a true “executing broker” subject to the duty of best execution.

To read the entire article, please click here

NSX exchange

Big Dick Behind Yet Another New Exchange; NSX v IEX

Former Lehman Bros capo Richard Fuld likes acronyms, and somewhat out of character for the Big Dick many on Wall Street remember him to be,  he also apparently likes the idea of inserting himself into a consortium that has created yet another new exchange platform–that eschews the notion of maker-taker for being ‘bad policy’ and leading to the subtitle of this story: “NSX Takes On IEX; No Rebates Allowed”

So, MarketsMuse curators ask our readers to pardon the misleading lead-in title; the latest entrant to the world of equities exchanges isn’t really new, in fact its legacy extends back 130 years. Yep, MarketsMuse curators from the fintech department came across this ‘Back to The Future’ story courtesy of coverage from WSJ’s Bradley Hope, our favorite “Clark Kent of Market Regulation and Trading Technology.”

One of the country’s oldest stock exchanges is planning a comeback next month.

The National Stock Exchange, originally founded as the Cincinnati Stock Exchange in 1885, has submitted a final rule filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission and could restart trading as early as December.

The revival of the 130-year-old exchange as NSX will bring the number of U.S. stock exchanges to 12 at a time when many critics of the market structure say there are too many trading venues. IEX Group Inc., an upstart that has positioned itself as a haven against predatory trading, also has applied to become an exchange, but that isn’t expected to be approved before 2016.

The new owners of NSX say they will introduce some novel features, starting with abolishing the prevalent “maker-taker” pricing system where firms that post orders on an exchange get a rebate of 20 to 30 cents per 100 shares traded and those that take the order are charged about the same amount.

NSX will only charge firms if they take a resting order and the cost will be just three cents per 100 shares, a cost of as much as 90% less than on other markets.

“We’ve heard a lot about issues with the market structure and agree with some of the criticisms,” said Mark Sulavka, chairman and CEO of National Stock Exchange Inc. “But we want to actually make changes, not just talk about them.”

Dick Fuld, Former Lehman Bros
Dick Fuld, Former Lehman Bros Chair/CEO

Mr. Sulavka is being advised by a range of exchange veterans and bankers including Dick Fuld–that’s right, the same guy who was CEO of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., who helped arrange the buyout of NSX by a new consortium.

Other advisors include Bill Karsh, the former CEO of Direct Edge and Kevin O’Hara, a former co-general counsel of the New York Stock Exchange. Louis Pastina, who oversaw NYSE’s trading floor until 2014, is chairman of NSX’s regulatory oversight committee.

Even if it “traded ahead”, those who missed it can find the full story from WSJ by clicking here

BrokerDealer Exchange Rebates: BuySide Not Happy

On the heels of the recent NYSE ‘outage’, which actually had little impact on overall equities trading volume, but did lead to volume spikes away from the NYSE and at competing exchanges across the fragmented marketplace, the volume also increased with regard to spirited discussions about market structure. And, whenever talking about market structure, the “rebate debate” insofar as “maker-taker” rebate and fee schemes remain a front burner topic. It is no surprise that many (but not all) sell-side brokerdealers are characteristically in favor of these complex Chinese menus offered by the assortment of major exchange venues and dark pool operators. After all, brokers are ever more dependent on these ‘rebates’ as the race to zero in terms of commission rates paid by institutional customers continues to eat into executing broker income. To counteract the business model impact on BDs, savvy executing brokers have [for a number of years] been making up for lower rates via capturing offsetting revenue from routing customer orders to those bounty-paying trade execution platforms.

On the other hand, nobody should be surprised that an increasing number of institutional investment managers from the buy-side are beginning to “get the joke”, but they aren’t laughing as many realize that brokers are effectively double-dipping by charging their customers a commission and also pocketing kickbacks from competing execution venues that pay those brokers to help light up their screens and provide so-called actionable liquidity execution.

A comprehensive database of global brokerdealers in more than 30 countries, including the US is available at www.brokerdealer.com

To wit, and in our continuing coverage of this topic, MarketsMuse curators spotlighted this week’s story from buy-side publication Pensions & Investment Magazine, which profiles the heightened concern on the part of buysiders and the growing number who are expressing their angst with the SEC, the agency that is ostensibly supposed to ensure fair market practices and protect the interests of public investors. Below are select take-aways from the P&I story.

The Buy-Side Says: “Along with conflict-of-interest issues with rebates, other concerns like increased transaction costs and lack of transparency have added to the complexity of today’s market structure,” says Ryan Larson, RBC Global Asset Management. Added Larson, “Whether it’s SEC mandated, or better yet, driven from market participants themselves, I think it’s time to finally address the elephant in the room and start thinking about possible alternatives to the maker-taker model. … It’s not just the buy side that has been calling for a pilot on maker-taker. It’s the sell side, some of the exchanges, Congress, even members of the (SEC) as well. When you see that diverse of a group calling for change, I think it suggests something very important — whether maker-taker is the right approach. This could be one of the most impactful tests ever taken up in market structure.”

The Not-So-Subjective Market Data Vendor Says: “The whole point of maker-taker is to incentivize display of liquidity in lit markets,” said Henry Yegerman, director of trading analytics and research at financial data provider Markit Group Ltd., New York. “Market participants who place trades that rest passively in a venue, and so add liquidity, get a rebate. Investors who aggressively cross the spread to access that liquidity pay a fee to do so.” Institutional investors that are looking to buy or sell large blocks of stocks “are frequently takers of liquidity,” he said.

The Altruistic Sell-Side Perspective: Joseph Saluzzi, partner, co-founder and co-head of equity trading of Themis Trading LLC, a Chatham Township, N.J.-based agency broker for institutional investors said the link between liquidity and maker-taker doesn’t exist. What maker-taker does increase, Mr. Saluzzi said, is volume. “Liquidity and volume are two different things,” Mr. Saluzzi said. “Maker-taker creates volume, and a lot of that is artificial.”

Mr. Saluzzi said liquidity access is not helped through maker-taker, but by changes in a fragmented market structure that would reduce the number of trading venues. “Liquidity is not helped by rebates, but by less fragmentation,” Mr. Saluzzi said. “Maker-taker is the linchpin of the problems with the market. It’s a relic of a system that was around 15 years ago.”

The Exchange Perspective: Not Everyone Agrees: IEX, the dark-pool operator whose ATS platform is now awaiting SEC approval to operate as a regulated exchange is perhaps the most outspoken critic of maker-taker fee/rebate schemes; customers are charged a flat rate commission irrespective of how an order interacts with prevailing bid-quotes. The New York Stock Exchange came out against maker-taker rebates in testimony by exchange executives in 2014, while Nasdaq Global Markets is running a pricing test program that lowers rebate pricing for select stocks to gauge the effects on liquidity. In two reports this year on the test, Nasdaq has said the lower rebates have had a negative effect on liquidity.

At the other end of the spectrum, executives at BATS Global Markets Inc., which is perhaps the second largest equities exchange as measured by volume, don’t support an outright maker-taker ban and think the rebate paid to liquidity providers matters, “particularly with less liquid securities,” said Eric Swanson, general counsel at BATS, Kansas City, Mo.

[MarketsMuse editor note: Mr. Swanson is a former SEC senior executive who served as Asst. Director of Compliance Inspections and Examinations during the same period of time that his wife Shana Madoff-Swanson, the niece of convicted felon Bernie Madoff, received millions of dollars in compensation while she served as head of compliance for Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities. According to Wikipedia, Swanson first met Shana Madoff when he was conducting an SEC examination of whether Bernie Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme. Ms. Madoff-Swanson’s father Peter is the brother of Bernie Madoff and is currently serving an extended sentence in a federal jail while Uncle Bernie is serving a 150-year sentence.]

The full story from P&I can be accessed by clicking this link.

 

The Man Who Is Transforming Equities Market Structure: Dark Pool Killer Targets Maker-Taker

For those who might have missed it, Jeffrey Sprecher (pictured above), the CEO of Intercontinental Exchange, which owns the NYSE, is determined to put the genie back in the bottle by turning back the market structure changes that have taken place over the past 10 years, including the surge of “dark pools” hosted by leading investment banks which internalized all institutional order flow and the dominant use of complex “maker-taker” fee models that exchanges have provided as a means of capturing order flow to their venues.

genie-bottle-blue-smokeAs reported by the WSJ  2 days ago, Sprecher has been negotiating with all of the major banks that operate dark pools and offering a %90 reduction on NYSE exchange fees if those banks will send the order flow back to the NYSE. According to the latest news, those banks are apparently on-board with the notion proposed by Sprecher, yet KCG, the group formed by Getco and the former Knight Capital, a major “market-maker” is opposed.

Here’s an excerpt from the story by WSJ’s Bradley Hope and Scott Patterson:

“..Under the proposal, the NYSE would drop the fee for trading stocks at its exchanges to five cents per 100 shares from 30 cents per 100 shares, the people say. Banks, in turn, would accept a rule known as “trade at” that would give more precedence to the stock exchanges for most orders. A trade-at rule would mandate that stock trades take place on exchanges unless private venues offered a better price. Advocates of the rule say it would force a significant chunk of the stock trades that occur away from exchanges back onto them.

Credit Suisse AG, which operates the largest dark pool in the world, has endorsed the proposal, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank AG, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., and UBS AG—which are among firms expected to be affected by the proposal—declined to comment.

“We’re actively involved in discussions with ICE and we are optimistic about the proposal yielding positive results,” said Jamie Selway, a managing director at Investment Technology Group Inc., a brokerage that operates a dark pool.

Last month, Nasdaq announced it was drafting a pilot program that would test the effect of lowering trading fees on a group of stocks. The pilot is scheduled to begin in February.

The NYSE proposal would require approval by the Securities and Exchange Commission and is likely to face opposition. Among the critics is KCG Holdings Inc., a brokerage firm that operates dark pools and a business that matches up retail stock trades.

“Mandating trading on exchanges is an elephant-gun approach motivated by commercial interests of a handful of market participants,” KCG said in a statement Wednesday.

The ICE proposal has been in the works for more than a year, according to people familiar with the situation.

Mr. Sprecher and Thomas Farley , the ICE executive appointed as president of NYSE Group, began discussing a variety of changes to their markets, including a reduction in fees, with Wall Street firms about nine months ago, according to a person close to the discussions. The goal was to try to get long-term investors such as mutual funds, as well as banks and high-frequency traders, to unite behind a broad restructuring of the market that included lower fees, the person said. Credit Suisse became more deeply involved in the discussions several months ago, the person said.”

 

The full WSJ story is here

 

Finra Steps Up Investigation Of Broker-Dealer Order Routing Rebate Schemes; Conflict of Interest Endemic to Current Market Structure

NYSE CEO Says “Not Good” while appearing before Senate on the topic of equities market structure and Maker-Taker Rebate Schemes.

Bowing to increasing pressure from regulators, law makers and law enforcement officials, Finra, the securities industry “watchdog” has launched its own probe into how retail brokers route customer orders to exchanges, according to recent reporting by the Wall Street Journal’s Scott Patterson.  In particular, through the use of “sweep letters” targeting various broker-dealers, Finra is purportedly focused on whether rebates associated with schemes that brokers receive when directing their orders to specific venues is a violation of conflict of interest rules, given that customers presume they are receiving best price execution when in fact, they often do not.

MarketsMuse, the securities industry blog that has long reported about payment-for-order-flow and the unsavory practice in which customer orders are “sold” by custodians and prime brokers to “preferenced liquidity providers,” who then trade against those customers and profit from price aberrations between multiple exchange venues and dark pools, takes pride in pioneering the coverage of this topic.

Now that main stream media journalists are beginning to “get it”,  a growing number of those following this story hope that WSJ’s Patterson and other journalists will shine light on the even more unsavory practice in which these same brokers imposing egregious fees on customers who wish to “step out” aka “trade away” and direct their orders to agency-only execution firms, whose role as agent is to objectively canvass the assortment of marketplaces and market-makers in order to secure truly better price executions for their institutional and investment advisory clients. Continue reading

Wall St Execs Do The Flip-Flop While Being Grilled In Washington; Payment For Order Flow Exposed

wsl

Conflict of Interest is Of Interest to Senate Panel Members “just learning about” industry-rampant Payment For Order Flow Schemes . Market Structure To Be Re-Structured?

Excerpts below courtesy of The Wall Street Letter’s on the spot coverage of the U.S. Senate investigation of Wall Street’s affection for high-frequency trading aka HFT, and with specific focus on order routing and execution practices, particularly with regard to kick-back inspired payment for order flow schemes, “maker-taker” rebate schemes and likely conflict-of-interest issues within the context of brokers such as Charles Schwab and TD Ameritrade (among others) failing to ensure so-called “best execution,” a role that necessarily precludes receiving payment for directing customer orders to any counter-party other than the one offering the best available price for that sized order at that point in time.

Here’s the WSL story as of 8 pm EST on the first day of testimony from members of the securities industry; no surprise to note certain executives take the ‘walk backwards’ and no longer defending the practices that have enriched their business models:

Market participants commenting in front of Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hearing into ‘Conflicts of Interest, Investor Loss of Confidence, and High Speed Trading in U.S. Stock Markets’ noted that the SEC needs to re-examine or dismiss the maker taker rule and subsequent rebates as they’ve harmed consumer confidence and efforts to provide best execution.

Tom Farley, president of NYSE, noted to Senators Carl Levin, John McCain, and Ron Johnson that the maker taker model has led to a proliferation of sell-side broker dealers executing orders on exchanges that are offering induced rebates to create liquidity, rather than sending orders that offer the best execution. Continue reading

Regulators Take Aim at Maker-Taker Fees; High-Frequency Trading v. Brokers’ Fiduciary Obligations

wsjlogoExcerpt courtesy of April 15 edition of WSJ and reporters Scott Patterson and Andrew Ackerman.

A fee system that is a major source of revenue for exchanges and some high-frequency trading firms is coming under the heightened scrutiny of regulators concerned that market prices are being distorted, according to top Securities and Exchange Commission officials.

SEC officials, including some commissioners, are considering a trial program to curb fees and rebates they say can make trading overly complex and pose a conflict of interest for brokers handling trades on behalf of big investors such as mutual funds.

At issue are “maker-taker” fee plans, which pay firms that “make” orders happen—often high-frequency trading firms that specialize in trading strategies designed to capture payments. The plans charge firms that “take” trades—typically big investment firms looking to buy or sell a chunk of stock or hedge funds making bets on short-term price swings.

The trial program would eliminate maker-taker fees in a select number of stocks for a period to show how trading in those securities compares with similar stocks that keep the payment system.

For the full story from WSJ, please click here.

Industry Titan Takes Exception to Maker-Taker

securities technology monitor

(Bloomberg) — Regulators could stem the migration of U.S. equity trading to dark pools by coordinating a cut in trading fees, an action exchanges are unlikely to take on their own, according to one of the biggest high-frequency firms.

Most exchanges are charging traders too much — 30 cents per 100 shares — pushing transactions off public markets to lower-cost private platforms such as dark pools, said Chris Concannon, an executive vice president at Virtu Financial LLC in New York. Regulators should review enacting a blanket reduction of the fees, which would also curb the rebates exchanges pay traders who facilitate transactions, he said.

The system of charging investors for trades while paying brokers, a model known in the industry as maker-taker, is common at the majority of U.S. stock exchanges after market making by humans became less profitable over the last decade. While these pricing systems probably can’t be dismantled, there are “things you can regulate to mitigate their impact on market structure,” Concannon said during an interview.

For the entire article, including compelling counter-points made by other industry veterans, please click here .