The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission will vote on whether to propose some of the biggest changes to the American equity markets in nearly two decades at a Dec. 14 meeting, the agency said on Wednesday.
“It’s about driving greater competition, transparency and efficiency and the marketplace,” SEC Chair Gary Gensler said in an interview with Yahoo Finance. The regulator will also consider whether to propose requiring brokers to provide more information on the quality of their customer trades, and requiring more firms to file the order execution reports.
Currently, retail brokerages send most marketable customer orders directly to wholesale brokers to be executed, as long as the broker is matching or bettering the best price available on U.S. exchanges. Large market-makers typically improve on the best price by a fraction of a cent. Gensler has criticized this model as limiting competition for retail orders.