Mar 13, 2012
Send MiFID II back to the drawing board – FPL panel
Market participants have
expressed their dismay at the direction in which the MiFID review is heading,
arguing many of the directive's current proposals ignore the workings of the
financial markets and their role in the wider economy.
The comments were
made as part of a session at today’s FIX Protocol Limited EMEA conference in London,
which examined how to minimise the impact of inevitable regulatory changes.
“The design of
capital markets should ensure that businesses can raise money and investors can
allocate capital,” said Guy Sears, director of wholesale at UK-based buy-side
trade body the Investment Management Association. “This doesn’t seem to have
been mentioned in the MiFID texts and drafts we have seen so far.”
Sears cited the
treatment of broker crossing networks, which under current European Commission
proposals could be classified as organised trading facilities (OTFs) and subject
to a stricter regulatory regime. This may include the prohibition of matching
orders against proprietary capital and the inability for brokers to control
which firms can access their internal venues.
“Capital markets
are a cost of doing business for the business,” said Sears. “Asset managers
therefore need choice when implementing investment decisions, but this does not
appear to be a regulatory driver during MiFID discussions.”
A number of other
proposals which could have widespread effects on the way trading takes place were
also discussed by the panel, with Stephen McGoldrick, director
of market structure at Deutsche Bank, suggesting parts of the initial MiFID II draft unveiled by the European Commission last October “displayed a
fundamental lack of understanding of how markets work”.
He pointed in particular to
new pre-trade transparency obligations for fixed income markets under MiFID
II’s new broader remit, which he said “don’t match the market they are trying
to regulate”, and proposals that could force all users of algorithms to
periodically inform regulators of the strategies they are using.
“These errors should be acknowledged and regulators
shouldn’t be too stubborn to admit earlier drafting errors and come up with
something different,” he added.
When it came to implementing new regulation, Denzil
Jenkins, head of compliance and regulation at the London Stock Exchange Group,
pointed to the power afforded US regulator, the Securities and Exchange
Commission, which can implement pilot schemes for new rules. This, he
said, helped encourage market innovation.
A recent example of such powers in action was the circuit breaker regime, implemented on a pilot basis after the flash crash on 6 May 2010. The
circuit breakers initially imposed a halt on
trading in individual stocks for five minutes in the event of it falling or
rising 10% or more in the previous five-minute period, but were later changed
to a ‘limit up, limit down’ mechanism following industry feedback.
“The European process for new legislation often leaves
little room for discretion by national regulators,” Jenkins said. “The US approach
allows more latitude and scope to make changes to things as practice bears out.
One worry is that we are creating a legislative edifice that might act as a
regulatory straightjacket on the industry’s ability to innovate."
Anish Puaar
+44 (0)20 7397 3817
anish.puaar@thetrade.ltd.uk