Small stock focus: Nasdaq critic vows he isn't taking sides
NEW YORK -- To some small-stock traders and regulators, William G. Christie is the Nasdaq Stock Market's public enemy No. 1.</br></br>But the 39-year-old Mr. Christie, a finance professor at Vanderbilt University who co-wrote the study that is shaking up the "Stock Market for the Next 100 Years," insists he isn't out to destroy the market. "We have no moral agenda. We're not taking sides," he says.</br></br>Of course, that may be difficult for Nasdaq's defenders to believe. Mr. Christie and Ohio State University's Paul H. Schultz shook up the dealer network that is the core of the electronic Nasdaq Stock Market with two reports earlier this year that suggest there is "tacit collusion" among Nasdaq traders at Wall Street securities firms. The reports directly triggered two dozen civil lawsuits against Nasdaq trading firms. More important, it led to the pending Justice Department antitrust investigation of Nasdaq dealers that was disclosed last month and the recent start of a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation.</br></br>In other words, the studies have led to the biggest legal and public-relations threat to Nasdaq since its founding in 1971.</br></br>To Nasdaq dealers, Prof. Christie and Prof. Schultz are nothing but ivory-tower types who wouldn't know a real trading floor if they were beamed down to it. But Prof. Christie says the facts stand on their own. Those facts, he says, were stumbled upon by himself and Prof. Schultz during a study on an unrelated Nasdaq matter.