Levitt plays down day-trading fears

Levitt plays down day-trading fears

DAY-TRADING, the short-term buying and selling of shares over the Internet, accounts for around 5 per cent of US share-trading but is not yet sufficient to cause volatility in the market. This was the view of Arthur Levitt, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who testified yesterday before a Senate committee considering the implications of the increasingly popular practice.

This was the first of a series of Senate hearings instituted after a loss-making day-trader went berserk in two trading houses in Atlanta, shooting a dozen people dead.

Alluding repeatedly to the affinity between day-trading and gambling, Mr Levitt cautioned that Congress could not be "every person's psychologist".