The core aim of this article is to give an overview of the domestic public supervision of securities markets in Romania and in the European Union in order to understand the role of Romania in the European context, taking investor protection as a study case. To this aim, the first part of the article offers an account of the institutional arrangements for financial supervision in Romania, and it gives an overview of the state of the art of retail investor protection in this important SouthEast

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... ropean country. The goal is to discover how the Romanian capital market supervisor is designed, and whether the existing public enforcement instruments offer appropriate responses to solve the problems encountered by retail investors. Then, the second part of the article provides a description of the new EU overseeing agency for financial markets, the way it works and how it deals with the protection of retail investors. The goal here is to see how the Romanian securities regulator fits within the European design. The results seem to suggest that the Romanian regulator is not likely to have a strong voice at European level and the current public setting for investor protection is yet to spread its wings.