While Irene splashed Wall Street, we Coloradans reveled in the ridden glory of the USA Pro Cycling Challenge. The 500-mile route hosted 130 of the world’s top cyclists including Tour de France winner Cadel Evans and both runners-up, Luxembourgers Andy and Frank Schleck.

We were there, clanging bells and hooting our hearts out. Here is winner Levi Leipheimer readying for the time trial that put him in yellow. The peloton left Avon here for Steamboat, and Levi is visible midway in yellow. At the finish, some 250,000 jammed downtown Denver for the epic, lapping conclusion. We are proud of American cycling and our state’s awesome organizational effort.

Speaking of peloton, Wall Street Journal reporter John Jannarone wrote Monday in the Heard column called “Traders Seek Salvation from Correlation” about how stocks race in formation. It’s among the best pieces we’ve seen on modern trading. Jannarone says that S&P 500 stocks show 80% correlation in the past month, meaning eight in ten move synchronously.

This is a source of distress for IR folks trying to distinguish a strong company story from the herd. We’d argue that rather than slamming the collective IR noggin into the burgeoning brick wall of macro-focus investing that you instead track program trading and establish what level is acceptable – and use it as an IR success measure. We wrote about this last week, so we won’t retrace the trodden path.

Why a mirror image across so much of the market? One driver Jannarone posits is Exchange-Traded Fund investing. According to Credit Suisse, these drive some 30% of daily stock volume. Jannarone also notes that trading in S&P 500 E-mini futures contracts is more than four times the combined daily volume of the two biggest S&P 500 ETFs, the SPDR, and iShares S&P 500 Index ETF. Continue reading →

Show of hands, please.

How many of you saw Levi Leipheimer’s monster run in the big ring up the finishing hill at Crested Butte yesterday to take Stage 1 of the Pro Cycling Tour of Colorado?

We’re bound for Vail later to see a couple stages. Across all the hours in the saddle, we have yet to stand at the barricade and shout ourselves silly as the world’s greatest cyclists power by, their body weight tied up in massive quads. Few things are as exhilarating as a wild race on bikes.

Except maybe big moves in your stock. Yesterday, a half-dozen clients’ shares jumped 10% or more. Five-percent gyrations were routine. Remember, we said last week that if institutions reset hedges with options expirations 8/17-19, then no matter what nasty economic data hit the fan stocks would climb on relative value alone.

We have been told by the creators of our synthetic markets, a handful of academics, that automated market-making and the maker-taker model for serving up fresh, sizzling artificial liquidity would magically wash that volatility right out of your stocks.

How’s that working?

What to tell your CFO when your stock jumps five points in a day? Few think it’s rational. But market structure is making utter mockery of investment. Public companies should demand a change to rules that have remanded price-setting to machines. Let’s end the NBBO and the national market system. It’s not working. But you have to ask for that, issuers. Continue reading →

Whew, we’re back to good.

That seems the attitude about market gyrations in August. Prices recovered. Heck, we should’ve skipped the mess and stayed on the Cape.

Across our client base, we saw few rational-price changes between Aug 1 and Aug 12. Rational investors were not responsible aside from stop losses triggering reactions. Trading data do indicate sizeable shifts in assets by global risk managers.

We talked about that last week. Responses to currency fluctuations. Institutions transferring risk by moving money continuously via electronic markets from bonds, to equities, to derivatives, to currencies. With fear of a currency meltdown rising, risk managers engaged in random, computerized, global buying and selling to discourage everyone from running to the same side of the boat and capsizing it.

We’re convinced that techniques developed after 2008 were employed to blunt this “tail risk” crowd behavior. That’s the chance that everybody does the same thing at the same time, destroying global portfolios in a mad rush. Computers randomly bought and sold. The lack of a trend reduced the risk of a rout. Continue reading →

Headline at 2:34 p.m. Eastern Time today: “Fed Pledges Low Rates Through 2013.”

How many recognize this as a currency-devaluation? Markets jumped 4% here in the U.S. as the DXY, the dollar index, dropped.

Last Sunday, the European Central Bank pledged to monetize debts of Italy and Spain. Monday, markets plunged globally. That’s a currency-devaluation. The central bank is promising to increase the supply of currency without a corresponding increase in economic output.

Most blamed S&P’s downgrade of US debt. But the dollar strengthened, and Treasurys increased in value. Why would the diminished instruments be more valuable?

Because that’s not what caused markets to tank. Continue reading →

Why are markets dropping like the thermometer at 8pm on Pike’s Peak?

Debt chaos, sour economic data, sure. We’re not market prognosticators, we track behavioral data. Under the skin of the news at market level, institutions shifted to managing portfolio risk about July 21. These events were observable. Algorithmic execution changed, and we saw what started it and what followed.

Large diversified asset managers swapped out of equities. That means they assigned the risk in portfolios to others through agreements that traded risk for safety at a cost. Why not just say “investors sold to manage risk”? It’s not accurate and it won’t be reflected in settlement data.

Of course, hedging produces a range of consequences too. Those underwriting hedges themselves hedge the risk they assume. That prompts speculating in whatever instruments are being used to hedge the hedges. The idea is to offset every point of exposure – like double-entry accounting, a credit for every debit.

Consider the Treasurys market – the one in peril till today. Primary dealers ranging from Banc of America to Goldman Sachs make markets in Treasurys. Average daily trading volume in Treasurys is more than $500 billion. Bond trading in total in the US averages more than $950 billion daily and nearly 80% is government securities.

Continue reading →