SEC votes to ban flash trading

It's taken a full year before the first real regulation has come down the pike. But finally we can see something.

(Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission proposed banning flash orders after lawmakers said the practice may give hedge funds an advantage over other investors.
SEC commissioners unanimously voted today to seek public comment on a rule barring exchanges and trading platforms from giving clients access to information about stock orders a fraction of a second before the market.
“Investors that have access only to information displayed as public quotes may be harmed if market participants are able to flash orders and avoid the need to make the orders publicly available,” Chairman Mary Schapiro said.

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wow, they did something!

My understanding is this is pure algorithmic manipulation to capture orders slightly before they are posted and trade accordingly. The only bummer is this employs some engineers to create such systems. Maybe they will hire engineers to monitor instead!

Would like to see engineers

innovate in other fields!

I'd like to see engineers paid like these guys were

I mean here they realize engineers can make people a lot of money....when in fact engineers every day make people a lot of money in all sorts of ways. ;) Right now we have Microsoft, Intel and so forth trashing their engineers to the point I really wonder sometimes how Intel esp. is able to crank out any innovation at all. I guess they kept a few but corporations like HP, man they just dumped their best engineers right and left, many of them have.