Quote from Dalmation:
No disrespect meant, but without seeing the code aren't you subjecting your firm and it's clients to undue risk? You are responsible for the legality if your clients and have a fiscal responsibility toward the others. Code that you don't verify could be placing damaging ordersinto the market and may not only be illegal but create hazards for your own infrastructure. You need to get up to speed on the Dodd frank bill and HFT regs.
Knowing your client is knowing how they trade. Not knowing the code you don't know your client. Therein lays the risk for the client and for you
First step to build trust is to publish a spreadsheet of your rates for different clients.
You are absolutely correct in some parts, but may be jumping to incorrect conclusions in others.
The "code" is the client's proprietary trading logic that decides what orders should be sent to the broker and when such orders should be sent. 99.999% of professional clients view such code as their hard-learned intellectual property and would not disclose it to anyone. This is fine because once the client's "code" generates an order and sends it to the broker, it is now the broker's job to verify that this order is not breaking any rules before forwarding the order on for execution.
With that said, you are right that it is the broker's job to make sure that no illegal orders make it to the market as that could jeopardize the client, the broker and its other clients, and potentially the entire system.
Now, here's where I believe that you may be jumping to incorrect conclusions: Under recent regulations, it is illegal for a broker to rely on the client's system to verify the validity, risk, and/or legality of the orders the client would like to execute. Such checking should be done by a system that the broker has both 100% control of and 100% understanding of. I think you would agree with this last sentence.
Hopefully, now you can see that while brokers do have to check every single order against several risk limits and legal conditions; brokers do not in fact have to "know the client's code" in order to perform such controls.
Furthermore, I fully agree with you that brokers should be "up to speed" on Dodd-Frank as well as HFT/No-Naked-Access regulations. Please let me know if you believe such rules state anything contrary to my beliefs above.
Overall, I guess we agree that "knowing your client is knowing how they trade," but disagree that "knowing the code" is the only way to "know your client."