I've said this before and I'll say it again. A connection between Nanex and Factom is the Holy Grail.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-man-wants-to-upend-the-world-of-high-frequency-trading-2016-02-02"Hunsader says a belief in fairness and transparency underpins his concerns. Current regulations are sufficient to ensure protection for investors, he says, but exchanges and market makers don’t abide by the rules, and regulators don’t hold them accountable, in part because they’ve been slow to adopt technology that would help them.
High-frequency traders, he says, get away with practices that “are killing the diversity of participants. As [they] get a larger and larger share of trades, you are going to get more and more of these damaging market events” like the one in August 2015.
He laments the lack of a consolidated audit trail, or CAT, a stream of time-stamped data on virtually all quotes, orders and executions, as well as customer information, that would represent unprecedented transparency into stock, future and options trading. It would help regulators monitor for anomalies that precede swings in asset prices, Hunsader says. Without it, he says, the SEC lacks credible evidence of wrongdoing.
Some agree with Hunsader. “As speed and complexity have become almost insurmountable forces in our marketplace, effective oversight simply cannot happen without the CAT,” SEC Commissioner Kara Stein said in September. The SEC declined to comment for this article.
“Markets have gone light years ahead while the surveillance system is outdated,” said Joe Saluzzi, co-founder of Themis Trading and a critic of high-frequency traders.
The SEC ordered the CAT’s creation in 2012, outsourcing it to a partnership of national securities exchanges and associations known as self-regulatory organizations, which are responsible for self-policing members including the NYSE, Nasdaq OMX, BATS, Chicago Board of Trade and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra), an independent, not-for-profit organization authorized by Congress to regulate market participants.
Guidelines for the project indicated that it would be implemented in 2015. There have been more than 700 meetings to discuss parameters, costs and vendors, according to the Financial Times. As of November, there was only a shortlist of potential vendors — Finra, SunGard and Thesys, which the SEC is reviewing.
This frustrates Hunsader, who calls the task “obscenely easy” since he is already able to collect similar data through his subscription feeds, albeit without participants’ IDs. “The Consolidated Audit Trail will NEVER get built,” he tweeted recently. "
