“Because the U.S. had moved ahead so fast, we had the opportunity to watch and decide in some cases that there were extremes we didn’t want to go to,” Kevan Cowan, the president of the Toronto Stock Exchange, said at last week’s conference.

American regulators have faced a growing demand at home for some sort of market reform from traders and exchange executives. At a Senate hearing on computerized trading last Thursday, one market analyst called for a moratorium on the new trading venues that have popped up in recent years, while traders on the panel recommended mandatory kill switches that could be flipped in case of technology malfunctions. The senator who called the hearing, Jack Reed, Democrat from Rhode Island, said “our marketplace has been evolving very quickly and it is not clear that our rules have kept up.”

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There are many explanations for the slower pace of reform in the United States, including the crush of work the S.E.C. has had to deal with in completing regulations under the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law. In addition, many of the largest American market participants, including the big banks, have built high-speed trading desks and dark pools and as a result have a vested interest in protecting them against new regulations.

The soft-touch approach of American regulators has won praise from many industry participants around the world who say that the rush elsewhere to impose new rules could jeopardize the lower trading costs that have come with the automation of the American markets. Michael Aitken, the chief scientist at the Capital Markets Cooperative Research Center in Australia, said the push for regulation in Australia and much of the rest of the world has been driven by “hysteria” rather than “evidence based policy.”

Last year an international operator of exchanges, Chi-X, opened the first competitor to the Australian Securities Exchange. Australia’s two exchanges are still a long way from the 13 public exchanges in the United States, but Chi-X has attracted over 7 percent of all Australian trading, largely by catering to high-speed firms. High-speed trading now accounts for 30 percent of all trading in Australia stocks, compared with 65 percent in the United States, according to the consulting firm Celent.

A coalition of Australian pension funds and investment firms, the Industry Super Network, wrote to the country’s top securities regulator last week supporting recent reform efforts and calling for a wholesale moratorium on new high-speed trading.