Karen and I are getting in boat shape ahead of a trip to Antigua (Motto: “Don’t ever say the name ‘Allen Stanford’ around here”). But we’ve encountered obstacles to the cycling part of the regimen: Wind and fire. One more, such as earth, and we’ve have a good name for a rock band. It’s been bone-dry and breezy on the Front Range, and already several range fires have burned black swaths.

Speaking of fires, we’re marching through them with the Issuer Data Initiative. The Number One Need is more names behind it. If you haven’t committed support for better trading data, do so today. Your peers will thank you someday, and you can remind them then that they owe you.

Before we get to what happened Mar 16-21 in trading markets, a word on BATS Exchange. The Kansas City operator of the third-largest American trading venue has made no secret of its interest in listing companies for public trading. BATS made it official today, announcing plans to offer IPOs another path to global liquidity.

Provided BATS offers competitive listing prices and good data, it can compete. We hope exchange executives will consider the key data points in the Issuer Data Initiative. BATS has a reputation for data excellence already, providing a great deal of free data to its trading clients.

We see too that BATS filed a proposed rule change with the SEC last month that will require customers to mark trades as principal (for their own accounts), agency (on behalf of others) or riskless principal (buying from or selling to a customer). See, issuers? Exchanges file rules to change how things are done. Issuers are participants in markets too. If they want something changed, they too can ask.

What drove trading markets roughly March 16-21 also speaks to the importance of good data. Somebody always must execute the trade and report it. That’s the way we all know the volume for any stock. On March 16, the G-7 countries announced a concerted effort to devalue the Japanese yen by flooding markets with currency. March 16-18 also included the monthly options-expirations cycle, and S&P quarterly index rebalances.

During the same period, we observed uniformity in trading activity for a set of “primary dealers” that work with central banks in the United States, Europe and Japan. Across the market-cap and sector spectrum, the same behavior occurred for this set of primary dealers.

We surmise that central banks armed these large brokerages with cash, which is how central banks engage in “quantitative easing.” The brokerages, also all commercial banks today, deployed it by buying securities from selling institutions. It had the desired effect, stabilizing equity markets and reducing upward pressure on the yen.

We’ve seen that many stocks have returned to their pre-March-10 “rational price” levels. But the behaviors producing those prices aren’t rational. If these were riskless principal transactions, do governments now own a bunch of equities with taxpayer dollars? Or were these all principal trades and so the brokers now have high levels of inventory?

Let’s suppose it’s the latter. Fine, so long as markets rise. Brokers can sell inventory as more buyers return to equities. It’s bad, however, if, say, Portugal defaults, causing the Euro to weaken and the dollar to rise. US equities would slide, and brokers would dump inventory to protect themselves as markets fell.

So everybody get out there and buy something made in Portugal.

Would you shrink your share base by 90%? What if it cleared noise out of your trading?

NOTE: See the update on the Issuer Data Initiative at bottom.

Citigroup, market cap $129 billion, plans to trim its 29 billion shares with a 1-for-10 reverse split. Citi float mushroomed from 5.5 billion shares when the U.S. government injected cash through warrants that converted to shares, which the Treasury then unloaded through Morgan Stanley while the Fed quantitatively eased the markets to solid gains.

Resisting the gravitational pull to ask rhetorically why government has power to print monopoly money, pump up its own outcomes, and put paper into one bank but not another, let’s make this Part Two of “lessons in liquidity.”

Last week we discussed the very antimatter to Citigroup, Berkshire Hathaway. BRK.A trades about 500 shares per day, mostly on the NYSE, without high-frequency trading (HFT), for about $127,000 each. There are 1.6 million shares out. Its beta coefficient, a measure of volatility, is lower than every Dow Jones Industrial component save Wal-Mart. Continue reading →

The Ides of March today carries an air of foreboding that dates to Julius Caesar’s demise in 44 BC. Before Brutus colored the day red, Romans did on the Ides what any other urbane culture might: They feted Mars, god of war. It feels lately like Mars has been trudging along the tectonic plates.

We still have $200 here for the first person to correctly answer last week’s two critical IR questions: Where do your shares trade? Which brokers trade them?

Speaking of the Issuer Data Initiative: Thank you, NIRI CEO Jeff Morgan, for sliding it across your desk today and out via the weekly NIRI email (note: Register for NIRI National by Friday for the early bird discount). Public companies, please commit your support so every IRO will have answers to the questions above.

Reading Dick Johnson’s noteworthy blog about Warren Buffett’s view of IR prompted a way to show why good issuer data matters. Berkshire Hathaway Class A shares (BRK.A) trade about 500 shares daily, over about the same number of trades per day. On rare occasions, a trade occurs off the NYSE, but most times if Mr. Buffett wants to know which brokers executed trades, that information is available because the trades occurred at his listing exchange. Continue reading →

Don’t pass Go.  I will give $200 to the first person who correctly answers two questions.

Only corporate IROs may answer. Apologies to the rest, but you’ll see why. Corporate IR pros, look up and write down your trading volume on March 4. First question: Where did your shares trade?

Second question: Which brokers executed the trades that, when added up, equaled that volume you wrote down for March 4?

Yesterday, Dow Jones reporter Jacob Bunge wrote about our drive to organize companies to petition Congress and regulators for more transparent data about their share-trading.

There’s a landing page on our website for the letter we’ve drafted. Our goal is to list 100 companies as supporters when we deliver this letter. It should be 5,500. I’ll tell you why in a moment. Continue reading →

“We determined that it was appropriate to re-examine the appropriateness of short sale price test restrictions.”

We copied that sentence from the SEC’s 334-page charter instituting Rule 201 amendments for short sales. While it’s amusing that the authors modified the word appropriate with the word appropriateness, what’s important is that the rule took effect yesterday, Feb 28. What is it and how might it impact investor relations?

It’s hard to summarize a document consuming 60% of a ream of paper in one sentence. But Rule 201 implements an uptick rule – which regulators removed as part of Reg NMS in 2007 – when securities drop 10% from the preceding day’s closing price. If that happens, an uptick rule will be enforced in which long sellers matching at the best bid or offer will be able to sell ahead of short-sellers, and shorts will only be able to sell if the price ticks up above the last bid.

The idea is that if long sellers get called up to the front of the line, it’ll promote investor confidence by reducing the severity of short-driven price swings. And it’ll improve market-efficiency by letting those with long positions off the boat, thus discouraging short sellers from trying to sink the boat. Continue reading →