Kyle Samani

The first is the Securities Act of 33, and that required disclosures for companies that issue securities.

The second was the Exchange Act of 34, which created the SEC.

And the third was the Investment Company Act of 1940, which created regulations for regulating public mutual funds.

The government's goal in these regulations was simple.

They needed to create trust, protect investors, and most importantly, restore confidence in our capital markets.

Those three laws today still stand as the foundation that our modern capital markets are built on top of.

In the 90 years since, we've added rule after rule, system after system.

Typically, it's been predicated on these financial intermediaries whose job it is, they're deputized to process these regulatory functions.

We've added layers of complexity, layers of rent-seeking.

And interestingly, most of these rules have come not from Congress, but from the administrative state.

Today's markets are both held together by these intermediaries and made more inefficient by them.

Investors have to go through exchanges, exchanges go through clearing houses, clearing houses go through custodians, on and on.

Each of these players takes a cut, they add a fee, they add a delay, they create complexity, and they also create inertia in the status quo so that it's harder to remove them later.

While the intent of these legal protections are generally pretty good, their evolutionary path over the last hundred years has produced in our modern system of bloat and cruft.

Markets still close at 4 p.m.

Fees are still high.

Access is still limited.

Inefficiency is baked into the system by design.

It still takes two days to settle a stock trade in 2025.

If you asked a group of engineers and traders to redesign capital market infrastructure from first principles in 2025, you wouldn't be recreating all of these intermediaries.