Comment Text:
I was reading the comment letters and find most of them ridiculous.
These are public markets so the coding should be available to regulators without delay, without hysteria. Traders cannot copyright strategy or method because anyone else could think of such a thing. Attempts to place their code beyond the reach of regulators should prompt regulators to visit their business promptly and demand to see the source code. The regulators should be able to ascertain whether entities are using legal or illegal systematic methods of trading in our public markets.
Compliance officers should be responsible for ascertaining whether the methods that their firm employs are compliant with current regulations under pain of losing their license to work in the securities industry.
The CFTC will have to exact a penalty sufficient to curtail bad behavior and cause others to change their behavior if they were behaving in the same manner. To this point, it appears that penalties are insufficient to cause a change in behavior. Further, the CFTC should avoid appointing firms that have transgressed recently to agency boards or to serve in an advisory capacity.
Contrary to the predictions of many of these commenters, the financial world will not fall apart if this rule were enacted. In fact, most of the commenters are a net negative to the market as they take the investors' $ out of the markets and put it in their pockets. They offer services that investors do not need, do not want. In fact, if there were a way of choosing whether to deal with financial intermediaries for their accounts, i would venture a guess that the majority would choose not to deal with them. The investors are captive and anything that the CFTC can do to reduce their captivity would be much appreciated. I think this rule would help the regulators to determine whether a violation is occurring and whether it occurs over and over throughout the trading day.
