The New Investor Cliffhanger

Abstract:     
In a recent UCLA Law Review article, The New Investor, 60 UCLA Law Review 678 (2013), available on SSRN at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2227498, Professor Lin argues that: Technological advances have made finance faster, larger, more global, more interconnected, and less human. Modern finance is becoming an industry in which the main players are no longer entirely human. Instead, the key players are now cyborgs: part machine, part human. Modern finance is transforming into what this Article calls cyborg finance.

In this short essay for the UCLA Law Review’s online supplement, I reply to Professor Lin’s article. The article provides a comprehensive survey of how technology is changing the capital markets and thus, inevitably, providing new challenges for securities regulation. Lin writes well and clearly, even about highly technical legal and technological issues. The article is exhaustively researched, reflecting a command of literatures from a number of disciplines.

But while Professor Lin has flagged a substantial number of significant problems caused by the wide-ranging impact of technology on capital markets and securities regulation, he has not yet solved any of them. I conclude by encouraging Proessor Lin to use this article as the jumping off point for a series of articles that will offer legislators, regulators, and judges, solutions to the problems posed by technological change in this area.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 12

Keywords: securities regulation, capital markets, technology

JEL Classification: K22

Accepted Paper Series