It was really great to see John Bogle on CNBC today and weigh-in on his views regarding the S&P downgrade - http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000037855 . It was also good to see and hear Jim Cramer asking Mr. Bogle a few prescient questions regarding ETF's and how ETF's are used by HFT (high-frequency-traders) to speculate. Both men agree that the SEC is not doing its job once again.
ETF's, HFT's, Dark-pools, have all made it much for difficult for "small" investors to have full-faith in the equities markets. The small investor knows they are being used as pawns and that "price discovery" and "liquidity" have very little to do with with why ETF's, HFT's and Dark-pools exist. They exist because they all make lots of money at the expense of others. They exist to "hide" activity, not to make the market more open, more transparent, or more accessible to the small investor. If the the SEC really cared why would they ever permit something called a "dark-pool" to exist in the first place; it's very name reveals it's purpose - "we're doing something we don't want the market to know about" in a very big way!
