Rivalries among securities exchanges are nothing new and, if anything, have intensified in recent years as markets from the New York Stock Exchange on down have become for-profit public companies, consolidated through mergers and expanded globally and into other asset classes. Now one of those asset classes – options – has turned into a particularly aggressive battleground for U.S.-based exchanges.
期权合约交易一直稳步增长(2010 average daily volume is running 10 percent ahead of last year, according to the Options Clearing Corp.), and eight markets are bumping up against each other in what Tabb Group analyst Andy Nybo characterizes as "hyper-competition." Automation has been driving down costs and promoting efficiency ever since International Securities Exchange, a subsidiary of the Frankfurt-based Eurex derivatives exchange, introduced the first U.S. all-electronic options platform in 2000.
芝加哥董事会选项交换有顶级市场份额，大约30％，与ISE和NASDAQ OMX的PHLX市场骑行，第二名10到12个百分点后面。
但就像真正的竞争水平的衡量标准以及这些组织认为股权的哪些组织是在证券交易委员会发起的监管程序中持续的持续下去4月20日联邦注册备案。
证券委员会拟议修订规则第610条规定，以确保有关上市期权的公平获取和费用结构。几乎所有的主要球员都在评论中称重，并对提案的各个方面进行了强大的详细论据。CBOE主席兼首席执行官威廉布罗德斯基的6月21日字母RAN 42页，例如，反对汇票的任何授权章程。
In a 22-page comment dated June 23, Joan Conley, senior vice president and corporate secretary of Nasdaq OMX, which operates both Philadelphia’s PHLX and the Nasdaq Options Market, called the SEC’s competitive analysis "flawed" and its view of price differentiation "incomplete," among other concerns. Like Brodsky, Conley derided any attempt to engage in "fixing prices" without clear evidence of a pricing problem. "There is no sound basis to limit the transparent, publicly disclosed, equally available access fees that maker/taker exchanges charge (and that support liquidity rebates) while placing no corresponding limits on other fees and practices that have an equal impact on competition," wrote Conley.
But while there may be broad agreement between these free marketers on pricing principles, there are other points of contention.
On August 13, ISE secretary Michael Simon filed a comment taking specific aim at rivals CBOE, PHLX and the Boston Options Exchange for allegedly violating the SEC’s standards for competitive and nondiscriminatory fees.
"Overall, we believe that an increasing number of existing and proposed fees from various options exchanges inappropriately impede competition for order flow by ‘stacking the deck’ in favor of firms that seek to trade against – or ‘internalize’ – their retail customer order flow," said ISE’s August 13 letter. Just to make sure it got the message out, ISE issued a新闻稿在三天后引用其总统兼首席执行官加里卡茨：“......确保不透明的费用规定在市场参与者类别中没有培养不公平的歧视，也不促进委员会的强大竞争标准的不公平歧视the marketplace. We have identified three instances where other options exchanges are using their fee schedules to ‘stack the deck’ in favor of firms that seek to trade against their retail customer order flow and deny these investors the full benefits of market competition for their orders. As part of their ongoing review of market structure issues, we urge the SEC to examine these practices and to take the necessary actions to prevent discriminatory fees that harm retail options investors."
聘用，Cboe Holdings总统Edward Joyce于8月24日发给了SEC，致电ISE的收费“毫无意义”。他写道，“各种期权市场之间的竞争是历史新高。然而，对竞争对手的鲁莽汹涌的监管指责是诽谤性的。“
"Never a dull moment," observes Nybo, head of derivatives for research firm Tabb Group in New York. The ingredients of hyper-competition, as he sees it, include "new entrants, structural changes such as penny pricing [one-cent increments] that influence the market structure, and eight options exchanges competing for order flow." The SEC’s Rule 610 proposal speaks to the pressures and levels of complexity that affect prices and other terms of competition, and, Nybo points out, such minutiae are "very tough on the compliance people."
Jeffrey Kuler是主编风险专业杂志，由全球风险专业人员协会出版。