"Although the Internet makes it seem as if you have a direct connection to the securities market, you don't. Lines may clog; systems may break; orders may back-up"
About this Quote
The seduction here is intimacy: the Internet “makes it seem” like you’re shoulder-to-shoulder with the market, fingers on the pulse, equal to the pros. Levitt punctures that fantasy in three blunt beats. “You don’t” lands like a gavel, stripping away the retail investor’s most flattering self-story: that a screen equals access, and access equals power. Coming from a regulator, it’s not technophobia; it’s a reminder about infrastructure, incentives, and who actually controls the plumbing.
The line works because it treats “connection” as a metaphor and then drags it back into the physical world. Trading feels frictionless until it suddenly isn’t. The list that follows - “Lines may clog; systems may break; orders may back-up” - is deliberately unglamorous. It’s not about volatility or bad picks; it’s about mundane failure points that reassert hierarchy in moments of stress. When markets lurch, the people with co-location, direct feeds, and priority routing keep moving while everyone else refreshes a frozen app.
Context matters: Levitt’s SEC era straddled the rise of online brokerage and the democratization narrative that came with it, right as retail participation and day trading were surging. The warning doubles as consumer protection and reputational armor for the system. If you believe the market is a videogame, you’ll treat outages like betrayal. Levitt is preemptively reframing them as design features of scale, not personal injustices - a quiet argument that “equal access” is marketing, not a guarantee.
The line works because it treats “connection” as a metaphor and then drags it back into the physical world. Trading feels frictionless until it suddenly isn’t. The list that follows - “Lines may clog; systems may break; orders may back-up” - is deliberately unglamorous. It’s not about volatility or bad picks; it’s about mundane failure points that reassert hierarchy in moments of stress. When markets lurch, the people with co-location, direct feeds, and priority routing keep moving while everyone else refreshes a frozen app.
Context matters: Levitt’s SEC era straddled the rise of online brokerage and the democratization narrative that came with it, right as retail participation and day trading were surging. The warning doubles as consumer protection and reputational armor for the system. If you believe the market is a videogame, you’ll treat outages like betrayal. Levitt is preemptively reframing them as design features of scale, not personal injustices - a quiet argument that “equal access” is marketing, not a guarantee.
Quote Details
| Topic | Investment |
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