May. 25 at 8:06 PM
⚖ 𝐖𝐡𝐲 𝐂𝐚𝐧 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐠𝐞 𝐅𝐨𝐫 𝐏𝐮𝐛𝐥𝐢𝐜 𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐚? — Mon 5/25/26
🪨 The trick is in one word: it's legally NOT "public data." Your order becomes a quote on the exchange's wire — and the law calls that recording THEIR product. Your public participation, converted to their private asset, the instant it crosses the system. 🎭
🏛 Here's the part that should end the debate: in 1975 Congress treated exchanges as "in effect, a public utility" — fair, because back then they were 𝐦𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫-𝐨𝐰𝐧𝐞𝐝, 𝐧𝐨𝐧-𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐟𝐢𝐭. Today
$ICE,
$NDAQ,
$CBOE are 𝐟𝐨𝐫-𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐟𝐢𝐭, 𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐡𝐨𝐥𝐝𝐞𝐫-𝐨𝐰𝐧𝐞𝐝 corporations. Same utility privilege. Different incentive entirely.
📜 The standard? Fees must be "fair and reasonable." Never defined. For decades the SEC rubber-stamped. The exchanges also control the SIP — the cheap public feed — so they keep it just slow and thin enough to force serious players onto the expensive proprietary feeds. Producer of the public good AND seller of the premium substitute. That's not a market. It's a regulated monopoly degrading its own free tier.
⚔ The honest line: cost recovery is legitimate. Monopoly rent-extraction is not. Publicly-generated data, sold by a statutory monopoly that controls its own free substitute, should be priced cost-plus-reasonable — not whatever-the-market-will-bear.
🛡 The 1975 model governs a 2026 market. Built for ticker tape. Running on tokenized everything.
✦ They're "permitted" because the law made them permitted — in an era when this meant ticker-tape subscriptions, not a billion-dollar margin extracted from electronic order flow.
𝘗𝘳𝘰𝘤𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯. 𝘙𝘪𝘴𝘬-𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘴𝘵, 𝘢𝘭𝐰𝘢𝘺𝘴.
$SPY $NVDA #wavervanir #volanx #quant #optionsflow #algorithmictrading #marketstructure
NFA.
