SIFMA today released the following statement from Tim Ryan, president and CEO of SIFMA marking the 1-year anniversary of the extreme market events that took place on May 6, 2010, otherwise known as the “Flash Crash.”
“Preserving and strengthening investor confidence is key to furthering America’s economic recovery and to boost job creation. The steps that have been taken over the last year have improved the safety of markets while continuing to keep them deep, liquid and efficient. As a whole, regulators, the exchanges and the financial industry will continue to work closely together to ensure the systems we put in place work in our ever-changing markets, and ensure investor confidence.
“The market events of last year shook investor confidence and America’s underlying trust in the structure, strength, and security of our financial markets. What we learned from that day is that while there were market-wide circuit breakers, there were no proper stop-gaps in place for when single stocks experienced extreme volatility.
“Over the past year, regulators, the exchanges, and market participants have worked together to fix what went wrong that day. In a unified effort, common sense workable solutions to curb volatility in equity markets have been put in place, including the implementation of a single stock circuit breaker, clarity on how to break erroneous trades and the treatment of so-called stub quotes.
“Additionally, market participants will continue to work with regulators and the exchanges to implement the new limit-up, limit-down proposal recently announced by the Securities and Exchange Commission. We believe this is a positive step forward from the original single stock circuit breaker system.”