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>“Today’s proposal is part of our larger initiative to modernize our equity market regulatory structure to address significant changes in our trading markets. In particular, today’s proposals are designed to improve data quality and data access for all market participants,” said Chairman Jay Clayton. “Both the content of NMS market data and the technologies used to collect, consolidate, and disseminate that data have lagged meaningfully behind proprietary data products and systems offered by the exchanges. By expanding the content of this data and introducing competitive forces into the market, the proposals would enhance transparency and ensure that improved NMS market data is available on terms that are accessible to a wide variety of participants in today’s markets.”
In 1975, one of Congress’s principal objectives for the national market system was to assure the availability of information with respect to quotations and transactions in securities.Currently, the national securities exchanges and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (collectively, the SROs) act jointly under three NMS plans (the Equity Data Plans) to collect, consolidate and disseminate information for NMS stocks. For each NMS stock, the SROs are required to provide specified market data (the NMS market data) to exclusive securities information processors (SIPs). The SIPs then consolidate that information and make it available to the public. Today’s proposal is designed to improve the NMS market data infrastructure by reducing the current disparity in content and latency between NMS market data and the proprietary data products that some of the individual exchanges sell directly to market participants. The proposal would replace the “exclusive SIP” model with a decentralized model of “competing consolidators.”