"Price information and price discovery (the impounding of new information into the security price), arguably the most important products of a security market, have many attributes of public goods."

"While US equity markets are spatially fragmented, they are, in fact, virtually consolidated into a single market with many points of entry."

"If a financial instrument trades on several locations simultaneously, this 'winner takes most' feature results in concentration of trading to the location that has the largest number of traders with no discretion to move between markets."

"The crucial function of a trading mechanism is to transform the latent demands of investors into realized transactions. The key to this transformation is price discovery, the process of finding market clearing prices."