A gear shifting technique has been developed in which modulation and equalization are shifted to achieve optional performance. In one form, two or more equalizers, each associated with a demodulator and message decoder, determine if the modulation being used can be increased in complexity in order to increase the channel throughput or determine if the modulation method should be reduced in complexity in order to improve the receiver error performance. The quality metrics can based on which equalizer-demodulator-decoder is set to first detect a valid message. Other factors can be considered with this technique such as a packet-error ratio and a signal-to-noise ratio. In a financial trading system, message erasures can be favored over errored messages by limiting the number of bit or symbol corrections permitted per message to less than the maximum possible for the selected decoding schemes.