Last night’s Space with
@nbhydrocarbons CEO Greg McCabe,
@annvandersteel, and
@laralogan was the preview.
Friday is the full
#MMTLP interview with Lara and Greg, and everyone should tune in, even if you never owned the stock (trolls are welcome too).
Because the legal filings are the part that do not need a microphone.
If even a small part of what is alleged in the
#MMAT Trustee’s complaint against Citadel, Anson and Virtu (who fought tooth and nail to NOT deliver their trading data/record) and what the litigation and discovery process may now surface, holds up, then this story becomes much bigger.
And I doubt those three are the only act on the bill.
In fact, around the 47-minute mark, Lara says it directly: this is impacting an “extraordinary number” of U.S.-listed companies.
She is absolutely right to raise that point.
Because if that is true, then this is not just one shareholder grievance or one unusual market event.
That is a Pandora’s box the financial market system now has to confront.
And when you eventually add crypto, tokenization, and 24/7 markets into that mix... the scale of the problem becomes exponential.
At some point, the machinery around all of this needs a proper reckoning... not another wrist-slap dressed up as “industry self-regulation”, right?
The longer
@FINRA’s “financial industry” appears to protect its paying members… ehhh, sorry... nearly said customers!🤣… while retail investors and issuers are left completely in the dark, the harder that model becomes to defend.
And no FINRA FAQ or stonewall can ever truly hide, reconcile, or settle the record after the fact.
If self-regulation means the club looks after the club while everyone outside it absorbs the consequences, that is not regulation. It is a membership organization with a badge.
Now here is the part people should appreciate.
It has taken more than four years to catalogue and map this market plumbing:
-10s of thousands of hours of research by hundreds of members of the MMTLP community.
-Record setting 1,000+ FOIA requests.
-Pro-bono lawyers.
-Media.
-Shareholders.
-Ethical staffers in DC.
And now AI tools...
All working, in one form or another, toward resolution for more than 65,000 families.
And in doing so, I am convinced it can also help educate Congress; so that future generations, entrepreneurs, investors, teachers, veterans, and the middle class more broadly, are better protected.
Listening to yesterday’s Space, I kept thinking... HOW do you explain the
#MMTLP fiasco to someone who doesn’t know a CUSIP from a boarding pass?
How do you explain it to someone with no financial background?
-At a family dinner.
-At the bar with friends.
-Over coffee with colleagues.
-Or to a complete stranger.
No technical jargon. No alphabet soup. No market-structure lecture... I’ve admittedly inflicted enough of those on people already! 😎
Just a picture everyone can understand.
So I started placing all the actors we have come across over the last four or five years into one setting. Yes... including the trolls! (You know who you are🧌)
Let’s place all of them in one place:
an airport...
Welcome to MIA:
MARKET INTEGRITY AIRPORT
Where market integrity occasionally goes missing in action.
...your departure board reads:
FLIGHT: MMTLP
DESTINATION: NEXT BRIDGE
GATE: U3
STATUS: HALTED
LUGGAGE: UNRECONCILED
Next post: the airport.