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Join Doug Cifu, the CEO of Virtu Financial, with Larry Tabb, Bloomberg Intelligence’s Head of Market Structure Research, as they discuss all things retail trading, in a virtual interview on Retail Execution in an age of Robinhood and GameStop. Retail investing has taken off. Within a little more than a year, retail share volume has tripled and has increased from 14.5% of total US Equity Trading to 23% of the total market. With this, experienced as well as new investors are buying everything from traditional stocks and ETFs to complex options and often taking cues from social media platforms like WallStreetBets.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell underscored his determination to return the U.S. labor market to full strength, saying Wednesday the central bank won’t begin to tighten easy-money policies until it sees much more improvement. The Fed will maintain ultralow interest rates and continue hefty asset purchases until “substantial further progress has been made” toward its employment and inflation goals, Mr. Powell told the House Financial Services Committee in testimony identical to his opening statement Tuesday at the Senate Banking Committee. He said those goals are “likely to take some time” to achieve.

Billionaire investor Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital Holdings Ltd. said its asset management unit has grown to $1.2 billion after launching new products, including a Bitcoin mutual fund in partnership with Canada’s CI Financial Corp.

An outage at the Federal Reserve is creating settlement issues for many financial institutions and exchanges. The Fed’s service status page shows that most of its services are currently down, including its settlement network. The central bank itself and its messaging system, FedMail, are both still available, according to the outage page. The Fed’s Automated Clearing House (ACH) payment system and FedWire Funds, the real-time settlement network that connects U.S. banks, are down among other key services.

Hours after U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell declared 2021 to be a pivotal year in consulting the public on the digital dollar, his underlings issued a paper describing what that consultation might look like. In a Wednesday FEDS Notes, Fed Reserve Senior Counsel Jess Cheng, Payments Specialist Angela N. Lawson and Technology Lab Manager Paul Wong said the onus would be on broadly engaging the public regarding the pros and cons of a U.S. central bank digital currency (CBDC).