In remarks at a Baruch College conference, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s director of the Division of Trading and Markets discussed research challenges arising from changes in trading and efforts to expand academic engagement. Josh White, the SEC’s chief economist and director of the Division of Economic and Risk Analysis (DERA), has recently restarted DERA’s Distinguished Visiting Scholars Program.
The shift toward 24/7 trading and the emergence of tokenized securities and perpetual futures are creating new questions for researchers. Forthcoming central clearing in the Treasury market is expected to introduce competition, while proposals to reform core aspects of the National Market System remain under consideration. Retail investors and passive managers also play larger roles than historically. As data becomes more widely available, the resources required to process expanding datasets may pose a greater constraint on original research than access to differentiated data.