âA consolidated audit trail that accurately tracks orders throughout their lifecycle and identifies the broker-dealers handling them will provide us with an unprecedented ability to effectively oversee the markets we regulate,â said SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro. A consolidated audit trail will increase the data available to regulators investigating illegal activities such as insider trading and market manipulation, and it will significantly improve the ability to reconstruct broad-based market events in an accurate and timely manner. A consolidated audit trail also will significantly increase the ability of regulators to monitor overall market structure and assess how SEC rules are affecting the markets, and will reduce the regulatory data production burdens on SROs and broker-dealers by reducing the number of ad hoc requests from regulators presently. The new rule becomes effective 60 days after its publication in the Federal Register. SROs are required to submit the NMS plan to the Commission within 270 days of the ruleâs publication in the Federal Register. Once the Commission approves the NMS plan, the SROs are required to report the required data to the central repository within one year, and members of the SROs are required to report within two years. Certain small broker-dealers will have up to three years to report the data. http://www.sec.gov/news/press/2012/2012-134.htm
These SEC guys are clueless as the matched trade data is already commercially available. They need to monitor the quoting/stuffing/liquidation rapes. They need to enforce integrity of time stamps as everyone that touches the data overwrites the stamp. The Nanex guys know data and make a pretty good case for a reasonable change: http://www.nanex.net/Research/Proposal/NanexProposal.html