Time lag. The Company will effect your orders as soon as practicable; however, the execution of such orders may not coincide with the dealing days stipulated in the relevant offering document of a Fund. Furthermore, before your order is placed by the Company with the relevant Fund manager for execution, the Company may aggregate and consolidate (either daily or from time to time) your order together with orders placed by the Company’s other clients. There may be a discrepancy in the price or value of a Unit between when you place your order with the Company and when the order is executed by the relevant Fund manager.
Time lag. The first can be called the “time lag” problem, which stems from the fact that, with traditional direct regulation, standards are fixed by the regulator at given points in time. Though more or less frequent revisions to the standards may be built into the system, even the most ambitious revision program will likely fail to keep up with technical innovations in the industry, or indeed to changes in environmental or economic conditions. Indeed, one of the benefits of traditional direct regulation - certainty for industry - would be compromised if the standards set were to change too frequently. As a result, direct regulation may disincentivise innovation: industry has little incentive to develop more cost-effective, efficient methods of reducing pollution if this would mean going beyond their legal obligations under the applicable standard set down by law.30 A related disadvantage of direct regulation focuses on traditional permit systems. As mentioned above, such permit systems form one of the primary means of implementing standards imposed on significant polluters by direct regulation, in industries such as chemicals, power generation and waste managements. Where permits are given out for free - as is normally the case - installations have no incentive to reduce pollution to below the permitted level. Nor, as traditional permits are non-transferable, are installations incentivised to lower their pollution in order to be able to sell (part of) their permitted amount for profit. This leads us to one of the points of contrast between traditional direct regulation permits and the Community’s Emissions Trading Scheme, discussed in detail in Chapter 4.
