WASHINGTON — The Securities and Exchange Commission signaled Wednesday it plans to issue four proposals next week to make the stock market more efficient for small investors, a key element of Chair Gary Gensler‘s policy agenda for Wall Street.
The SEC said its five-member commission will consider proposing the rules in an open meeting Dec. 14. If a majority of the panel, which includes Mr. Gensler and two other Democrats, support the proposals, they will be opened to public comment before the SEC decides whether to finalize them.
Mr. Gensler, nominated by President Biden, has repeatedly said U.S. equity markets can be improved for ordinary investors who often pay no commissions for trading but face other, more-opaque, costs. In a June speech, he outlined a series of potential regulatory changes that SEC staff were drafting.
The four items on next week’s meeting agenda were all mentioned in that speech. They include an “order competition rule,” to require some trades by individual investors “to be exposed to competition in fair and open auctions before they could be executed internally by any trading center that restricts order-by-order competition.”
