Time to push Nasdaq to exchange vows with NYSE
Three-card monte may have returned to Times Sq𓄧uare — behind the glass facade of Nasdaq h༒eadquarters.
Chief Executive Bob Greifeld — fresh from his $10 million SEC fine over the Facebook IPO debacle — is scheduled this week to appear again, this time before Commissioner
Mary Jo White, to explain his latest glitches.
Deep inside Nasdaq’s ultra-modern curved-glass tower, the power has begun tꦡo flicker.
Twice in the last two weeks — two relatively slow, quiet, low-volume weeks — Nasdaq has not been able to provide accurate🃏 pricing on stocks.
Maybe for the sake of market structure the SEC and Treasury should pull a page from the financial-crisis playbook and nud🌺ge the NYSE to take over the Nasdaq — much like the regulators that pushed Merrill Lynch into Bank of America’s arms and Bear Stearns into JPMorgan’s — if only to give jittery investors some sens🅺e of security that the next flash crash is not hovering just a few moments away.
One thing is for sure: Inside ൩Nasdaq’s vanity tower, the “technology exchange” has fallen far behind the NYSE/ARCA in e𝓡lectronic trading.
What would happen if we were to get surprised by a Federal Reserve quantitative-easing announcement or major geopolitical event, and things became disorderly because Nasdaq couldn’t function again, but this time with the system stress𒆙ed?
It’s time to either nudge the exchange into the NYSE’s arms, or do away with the awkward structure of the exchange being a public company trying to make or beat next quarter’s earnings-per-share estimates while sacrificing necessary safeguards that protect our financial syst🌺em.
It appears that the high-frequency-trading servers sitting nex🅺t to the exchange’s Jersey City operations center are far more robust th𓆏an what Greifeld is working with.
Can we afford not to know how a major exc🌠hange will perform when we need it the most — on a craz🌜y, high-volume, news-event day?
No, we cannot. The faster the ♍regulators aggಌressively address the market’s plumbing from the technical systems side, the better and more sound our financial system will be.