[michaelwsherman]

I did some regulatory work as well, for an upcoming regulation called Reg CAT. CAT will require all brokers, traders, exchanges, etc. to report essentially everything that happens--orders, cancellations, trade executions, etc. Right now the SEC really has no way to catch the majority of regulatory hijinx (look at the years-long attempt to track down the cause of the 2010 "flash crash").

Hopefully this will improve the ability to regulate in the future. But it probably won't result in significantly more enforcement--the regulation is written in such a way that the exchanges and FINRA will carry the primary regulatory burden rather the SEC itself. This means that despite there soon being a system that could, say, give you every reg NMS violation via a database query matched to a log of historical latencies, very little will likely change.