Here's a heretical thought - what is needed may be something like what is used on the Band-X spot market (http://www.band-x.com/) for voice and data capacity.
On Band-X, you commit to honor your bid/ask prices, and contractual obligations, or you will be booted off. You have to fill out a detailed registration in order to be authorized to use the system. People post listings that are organized by categories. For example, someone might put up a bid saying, "I need 512 Kbps over fiber to Germany and I will pay nnnn dollars for it for one month."
I know that there are such electronic trading systems for brokerages to use, such as Instinet. What would be really heretical would be to set up such a system for the average investor to use. You could have a trusted third party (a clearinghouse) act as an intermediary between buyers and sellers. (Perhaps, you could deposit shares and funds in some sort of escrow arrangement). Modern technologies, like cryptographic digital signatures, could be used to verify bids and asks.
Of course, having such a system would eliminate the role of the market maker or specialist, and thus such a plan would be strongly opposed by Wall Street. We have the technology nowadays to do something like this -- but whether or not you could get the necessary legislative and regulatory approval would be the main challenge. Cynic that I am, I think that Wall Street would put enough pressure on the powers-that-be to prohibit such an arrangement.
Paul M. |
