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Page 187
after 11 years at the helm of the STA. I would like to think that I helped to save his soul by confronting him with the truth.
My Comments On The NASD Litigation
I am proud to say that the American legal system works. O.J. Simpson discovered that the legal system works well if you have a couple of million dollars to throw at it. It also doesn't hurt to be absolutely correct in your cause and spend thousands of hours agonizing over the legal and moral issues. All you need in order to triumph over a regulatory agency is millions of dollars and devotion to a cause. You should also be willing to lose many hours of your life, and risk the wrath of the bureaucracy and the financial community in which you earn your livelihood. Failure is not a viable option because you could be barred from the industry for life should you lose.
All-Tech eventually prevailed in court. But the out-of-pocket legal and associated costs added up to a seven-digit number. For example, it cost $6000 just to typeset and bind our legal brief in a form the judges on the Federal Court of Appeals would even read. Fortunately, SOES trading was profitable enough for my firm to pay the heavy legal fees and out-of-pocket costs of carrying an otherwise unnecessary litigation.
At the end of the litigation, all the NASD did was rescind a rule that never should have been enacted in the first place. It is difficult to recover money damages from the NASD because it calls itself a quasi-governmental agency. The NASD knows that it has no downside risk in enacting punitive rules. As an investor you paid for the NASD's legal expenses as part of your brokerage commissions.
Nyse Management Principles
The absurdity is that top executives of exchanges do nothing to encourage meaningful or helpful change for the betterment

 
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