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August 13, 2010 at 08:00 PM
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) plan to deliver a joint report in early September to the two agencies’ Advisory Committee on Emerging Regulatory Issues regarding their continued examination of the May 6 market crash, known as the “flash crash.” The report will compile findings from two agencies’ research over the last three months. The two agencies released preliminary findings on May 18.
SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro said at the third joint committee meeting held Wednesday, August 11, which focused on retail investor perspectives and the role exchange-traded funds (ETFs) may have played in the “flash crash” on May 6, that as part of the SEC and CFTC review of market events on that day, the agencies are pursuing two related courses of inquiry. The first, she said, “is empirical and data driven. SEC staff has been reviewing raw transaction and order data, order book ‘snapshots,’ trade summaries, information about broken trades, and information related to initiation of LRPs and self-help.”
The second review, Schapiro said, was focused on “extensive interviews with market participants — their first-hand accounts of what occurred on May 6 and their responses to those events.” These efforts, she continued, would be included in the SEC-CFTC joint report that will be presented to the agencies’ joint regulatory committee next month and also shared with the public.
Noel Archard, a managing director at BlackRock and head of the product team for Blackrock’s U.S. exchange-traded fund (ETF) business, was a panelist at the August 11 meeting. He noted that growing size of the ETF market, stating there are currently 985 exchange traded products available in the U.S. market with $797 billion in assets invested, which represent 30% of the total volume traded on national exchanges.
While ETFs holding U.S. fixed-income securities and non-U.S. equities “were largely unaffected and generally traded at prices within normal ranges of underlying asset values” on the day the “flash crash” occurred, he said. “Many ETFs holding U.S. equities, however, did not. In our view, four different factors simultaneously contributed to market prices for some ETFs diverging from underlying asset value.”
First, there was a sudden market freefall in U.S. equity prices, which preceded the fall in ETF price Archard said. Second, anxiety over potential trade cancellations caused liquidity providers to fear that normal ETF hedging strategies would be interrupted.
