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Sebi chairperson Madhabi Puri Buch on Wednesday said any business on the 'black box' model that cannot be audited or validated will not be permitted. She also said since data is a public infrastructure, any attempt by any private party to own them cannot be tolerated. "We are not for or against algo trading as long as there is sufficient transparency and disclosures. Business models cannot rely on a black box which is not open to sunlight.. therefore any claim that cannot be audited and validated cannot be permitted," Buch said addressing the Global Fintech Fest here this morning. The warnings from the markets regulator come amid reports that it may clamp down on algo trading, which in the past has been misused by certain brokers with the connivance of top NSE officials. Earlier this month, Sebi had issued new guidelines for stock brokers providing algorithmic trading services after it was found that certain stock brokers provide algorithmic trading facilities to investors through
Ajay Shah in his article, "Who is afraid of algorithmic trading" (August 22) has rightly emphasised empirical evidence as the basis for decision-making. It, therefore, behooves him and his ilk to produce empirical evidence that algorithmic trading has furthered the prime purpose of capital market, namely, channelling savings into financial assets.Not unlike the prognosis of Irving Fisher just before the great crash of US markets in 1929 that "stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau", Shah, in his article, "A crisis? Or a mere recession" (March 19, 2008) judged the 2008 crisis as: "This may well be a recession, but it is not an emerging markets-style crisis." What happened subsequently hardly needs mention.The murky, if not sinister, role played by "neutral academics" in engineering the crisis of 2008 was exposed in the Academy Award-winning documentary, Inside Job. Sophistication for its own sake serves no purpose; on the contrary it is the handmaiden of de