Yet, as Most and Bloom were discovering at AMEX in 1988, the SEC had essentially requested the ETF’s very creation. “The theory presented was that it would be possible to create baskets of key stocks available for sale,” says David Ruder, a professor of law at Northwestern University who was SEC chairman from 1987 to 1989. “Those baskets would then be able to be sold without causing the whole market to collapse.” It was just a suggestion, Ruder says, and one the SEC didn’t expect anybody to act on. Bloom remembers another detail he and Most latched onto: He recalls the SEC indicating that if someone wanted to engineer such a product, the agency might grant approval quickly.
The AMEX team dropped everything else and dove in. “We were essentially reverse-engineering what the SEC called for in their report,” Bloom says. “We viewed it as a product proposal being made by the regulators.”