The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) today announced that the first day of Regulation NMS implementation had launched without any major problems for firms or the markets.
“The industry, the SEC and the exchanges have all worked extremely hard to ensure a smooth launch. We can happily report that through the first day of trading, we did not experience any major disruptions or problems – a credit to the hard working men and women who have labored to get this new system up and running. The new Reg NMS order protection and access rules have been a major undertaking for firms and exchanges, and their implementation is the result of several years work,” said Ira Hammerman, SIFMA’s general counsel and senior managing director. “This should bode well for the next stage of implementation.”
July 9th marked the start of full industry compliance with Rules 610 and 611 beginning with approximately 250 National Market System (NMS) stocks from the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ and the American Stock Exchange. Rule 611, the order protection rule and popularly known as the trade-through rule, requires market centers to route orders they receive to other markets that have better prices available under certain circumstances. Rule 610, the “fair access rule,” mandates linkages between the markets that enable the routing of orders to other markets in compliance with Rule 611. August 20th is the scheduled date for full implementation with all NMS stocks. SIFMA staff and representatives from the broker-dealer community, exchanges, vendors, the SEC and the Financial Information Forum have worked together for the past two years to ensure a coordinated approach to implementing Reg NMS.