........................................ The hell it's not..... I am not talking about today's setup.... Tomorrow....it is all about the BATS model ....ie the one who tagged the almighty NYSE in a very short time frame....and is currently tagging the LSE.....with a handful of people and basically what is time-stamping software..... First come first served.....market players put in what comes off their keys.... The direct access electronic program could care less if its IBM, sugar, bond units, derivatives,,,,or any other name.... It is just a figure with a label that is matched off by first come first served ownership constrained by $balance.... The exchange will run world wide 24/7 ....all labels..... Like today's system....no.... Like tomorrow's system.....absolutely.... BATS 24/7.....you put in what you want....first come first served.... no uptick rules....supply is electronically tagged....no locates.... Transactions will cost almost nothing.... It wasn't long ago we were watching pneumatic boards and putting paper orders in vacuum tubes to the clerk.... And wow we were getting real time quotes one at a time with volume on quotron.... Tomorrow will be way different than today.....
By the way.....it is high time that US citizens start insisting on the dramatic decrease in govt. size.....while changing the tax structure to a consumption tax only....eliminating all other taxes.... The US needs lots of business units whereby the incomes are increasing and the debts decreasing.... The current set of poly con fools are going in the opposite direction....
I support a family of 4 trading. Paint me whatever way you want. Don't forget how politians work. 1) Votes 2) Political contributions (what gets votes... and power) Having one of the most powerful deep pocket lobbies on your side is good don't you think?
Yeah we have too much debt so we must find ways to raise more taxes, that is the only way we can fix it I would of thought that spending only what you have would be a much better way to go. If you go and study the history of taxes, the war against england was fought over something like a 3% tax on sugar imports. My gosh damn them for taxing us that much we refused and kicked their asses. I just wish we could come together as a country and forbid the abuse that washington is doing to most of the country.
Do you just mainline the big lie and never check to see if it has any basis in fact? One thing, the last Democratic president, who I did NOT like, left a huge surplus. Your buddy Bush/Cheney, with his unfunded mandates and "privatization" funneled huge amounts of money to his peeps, destroyed the functionally of government regulation and in a speech I saw, leaned on Fannie and Freddy to buy "American Dream Loans". Fortunately the Fs refused to buy the so called "Liar loans" which is why they are 80% held by commercial banks. Your buddies have been in charge. They did this. You sound like a Chicago School Idiot. Remember the Laffer Curve? Koch spent a lot of money on Cato Institute Flacks trying to show that it had anything to do with reality. But they were never able to because it does not. Make a graph of the top marginal tax rate in a year and the GDP growth for that year. You CAN do that can't you? You will see something that you might want to think about. Report back. About the tax. I think that they intend to tax the profit. Not the value of the underlying stock or contract. If it is taxed just a little bit then the government can follow the action. Right now the way the exchange nets trades who did what is obscured. It could keep WS from doing a lot of funny business like naked shorts. I am not against it if the tax is truly on the profits and is .1%. I actually trust the government more than the exchanges. You can't regulate what you can not see.
Here's what happened when they implemented a transaction tax in Sweden. The tax lasted about 6 years (implemented 1984, doubled in 1986, abolished 1991). The tax started at 0.5% on equity trades and was doubled to 1% in 1986: Despite the lower tax on fixed-income securities, the impact on market trading was much more dramatic. During the first week of the tax, the volume of bond trading fell by 85%. The volume of futures trading fell by 98% and the options trading market disappeared. Trading in money market securities, which faced a tax as low as 0.2 basis points, fell by 20%. This reaction was due in large part to the existence of a wide variety of non-taxed substitutes. Once the taxes were eliminated, trading volumes returned and grew substantially in the 1990s. ... The revenues from taxes were disappointing; for example, revenues from the tax on fixed-income securities was a dismal 50-80 million Kroner per year compared to the initially expected to amount of 1,500 million Swedish Kroner per year. The effect of passing something like this would be catastrophic. Other jurisdictions (Singapore, HK, the more capitalist European countries) would fall over themselves to attract a share of the gigantic US trading volume. Just imagine the stories in the press... CME goes out of business, Silicon Valley companies launching new IPOs in China, etc. Government will do whatever the hell it wants but I suspect the tax would be repealed in a few years even if it were passed. Another possibility is a nominal tax, but with so many exemptions and loopholes that the effect is negligible.
To give but one example where a significant price change will happen off-exchange with a near complete lack of transparency - M&A. You know how the street works - if there's a loophole in one place they'll find a way to package things up so that all kinds of things look like that loophole.