The Securities and Exchange Commission voted yesterday to require exchanges and a broker oversight group to build a single system to monitor and analyze trading activity across U.S. equity and options markets, Bloomberg News reported today. In a 3-2 vote, the SEC approved a rule requiring the exchanges and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which oversees 4,400 brokers, to establish a so-called consolidated audit trail that will enable the reconstruction of market crises and expedite surveillance across 13 equity exchanges, 10 options markets and more than 200 broker-dealers that execute stock trades away from public venues. The effort is part of the agency’s response to the May 6, 2010, stock rout that temporarily erased $862 billion in U.S. equity value.
