Community

It is human nature to attribute success to self and failure to outside influences. When you make money as a day-trader, it is due to your knowledge, skill and intuition. When you can't make enough money, it is because of somebody or something. Can it be the evil HFT and the rigid market infrastructure?
There are different ways of making money. One can invest in technology and infrastructure to achieve competitive advantage. Others use human psychology and desire to find somebody to blame in order to promote their own high-frequency ticker plant or equity trading platform.

Yes. It looks like we can end up with a small set of strong pan-European exchanges. I hope it will lead to competitive and efficient market

I think technology can do it. An advanced electronic surveillance system should be responsible for spotting such anomalies, alerting market control and enabling them to take appropriate actions.  The question is whether solutions that are currently available satisfy these requirements

I would argue that the industry can offer solutions for tier two and three. LSE Baikal Liquidity Aggregation Service is a good example. On the other hand, I am not entirely convinced that strict limitations on pre-trade transparency waivers from CESR and other regulatory activity in the area of dark pools help establish a better marketplace.

It is nice to discover that CESR is going to issue guidance on pre-trade transparency waivers around the end of March…

As always, my vote would be for reducing costs or investing into systems targeted at reducing costs. Better risk management can be achieved just by introducing more conservative assumptions into existing models instead of platform redesign.