The Role of Market Participants in Equity Market Reform

Recently, the financial firm BlackRock released a report to the SEC offering the firm's views on necessary market reform. The 7-page report points out a number of important issues that BlackRock thinks could be solved that would increase investor - and public - confidence in the markets, without a major overhaul of the markets. Points of focus that I can really support include

• Reducing market structure and order type complexity
• Modernization of data access (make the exchange data feeds work as well as the privatized ones)
• Decrease exchange access fees
• Promote greater transparency at every level of the market

I think this is a great move by BlackRock. They have a lot at stake here ($4.32 trillion in assets under management according to their website), so being proactive is a good play. Perhaps this will strike up a trend and we'll see other large financial companies do the same. 

Let's hope that these market reforms are enough to satisfy the general public, who right now think all of Wall Street acts something like this guy...

Wolf of Wall Street

We'll see. Anyways, I really like what BlackRock has done. I think they put forward some good recommendations for reform that seem very researched and mostly for the public good rather than to the benefit of the company.