Diversity of opinions is good, thanks for sharing yours. I confess that I was willing to concede that the SEC might have some special knowledge with respect to securities trading and therefore gave their words considerable deference.
Therefore when the SEC said, "The
Commission recognizes that investors desire to trade large blocks of
securities anonymously and free of the price movements that often
accompany such transactions." I took it more or less on facevalue.
Assuming the SEC wasn't out to lunch when they said that, as well as other comments they made, then in a general sense I thought you could apply the Field of Dreams test, i.e., if you build it, they will come.
"It" of course refers to a system that meets the desires of institutional investors. Just per the one sentence above desire =
anomymous and no price movement. On both of these items, Ashton's system measures up quite well.
With Respect to the anonymity desire, the approval says, " The Commission believes the System may provide benefits to market
participants, especially those who trade in large blocks. Specifically, Participants will enjoy complete end-to-end anonymity in their Orders and Commitments; as a result, their proprietary trading strategies will not be revealed to other market participants.
With respect to no price movement, by definition, the VWAP provides for this. Now maybe institutions have no interest in trading at the VWAP, but the fact that imperfect systems have sprung up would seem to undercut that assertion. It would be interesting to know the volume of shares that are traded over these type of systems.
Outside of the SEC, Ashton's CEO first estimated 20 million shares a day per and then raised the estimate to 20- 30 million shares a day by the end of the year. Then in the last PR, he mentioned to the effect that interest is greater than expected. THis doesn't come as a surprise to me assuming that there are institutions that want to trade anomymously at a fair price. As best I can tell, Ashton's system would address the desires of any such investors. Also interesting that a concern of the SEC's was that too many shares of a given security might be traded at the VWAP.
Anyway, I apologize if my comment this morning, which was just an opinion, caused you to miss out on the opportunity to pick up shares today in the 7s, or 8s for that matter.
Shortly, we shall find out if there is interest.
Cheers |
