While Florida voted, Morgan Stanley won the Facebook primary.

A unit of Thomson Reuters broke word that the big bank will helm a team of other big banks for what in May could be the biggest IPO, raising perhaps $10 billion.

We don’t care who underwrites the deal. But thinking about Facebook and its banking soldiers of fortune, the giant and the mighty in massive conformity, we thought of the markets.

In the data we track, Morgan Stanley is king of index program-trading executions. For large clients of ours, its volumes surpass those of small exchanges. At the Nasdaq, Morgan Stanley is the top liquidity provider, trumping fraternal behemoths BofA Merrill and Barclays and high-frequency clearing maestro Wedbush. Last June, Global Custodian’s annual ranking of prime brokers – banks bundling securities services for the buyside – slotted Morgan Stanley a close second to Goldman Sachs.

We wrote in September how the same names show up everywhere. The ones running books of derivatives, making markets in Treasuries, trading bonds electronically and correlating seas of equity executions are the same.

Lost in the long shadows of the large was word that technology research boutique Kaufman Brothers closed its doors this week. Ticonderoga Securities shut down earlier is month. Formerly Reynders Gray & Co. on the floor of the NYSE, the firm offered differentiated research, direct-access trading and agency executions. WJB Capital, another boutique, shuttered around January 4 after failing to raise capital and seeing its financing costs rise as high as 25%. Continue reading →

Good to see you folks in Boston last week. But I needed Denver to thaw me out. It was seventy here last Saturday. I washed the car in T-shirt and flip flops.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. So it goes at the Nasdaq.

Last autumn the exchange proposed to charge small-cap companies fees of up to $100,000 to incentivize market-makers to trade small-cap ETFs, arguing to the SEC that it would infuse thinly traded securities with liquidity. The rule would have required the SEC, FINRA and the exchange itself to reverse longstanding prohibitions on paying market makers to trade securities. For certain exceptions only (of course, exchanges pay billions of dollars in rebates to “liquidity providers” each year).

The SEC promptly rejected the rule-filing. Now it’s back. See it here.

IR folks, do you know the adage about being wise as serpents but meek as doves? Question what you hear from exchanges that rely on data and transactions – not issuers – for revenue and profits. Take nothing at face value. Examine the facts. Continue reading →

Despite Denver’s rude throttling by the New England Patriots, I am still bound for Boston to panel at the Wednesday NIRI chapter meeting called “A Day in the Life of a Trade: How Can IROs Know What’s Really Happening?” Hope to see you there!

One of our technology geeks shared a link at TED, the place where nerds of a commonly self-aggrandized feather gather to bloviate about culture. In this one, Kevin Slavin, founder of a game-hatching thought shop bought by Zynga, discusses how algorithms run our world. The guy is a good speaker and knows his imagery. Of algorithms, he says: “We’re writing things that we can no longer read.”

Slavin sets up his piquant point this way. He was on a flight with a Hungarian physicist who’s on Wall Street writing algorithms. The Hungarian used to work for the Soviets using math and physics to find American Stealth aircraft. Apparently, technology dissolves the signature of Stealth planes into a million fragments so they won’t look like planes to radar. The Hungarian wrote equations to find electronic tidbits hiding planes. Continue reading →

At county fairs when I was a kid you could buy a “Shoshoni Weather Gauge,” which hawkers said could forecast the weather like an American Indian.

It was a rock tied with a leather strand to a wooden stand. The instructions said: “If rock is wet, it’s raining. If rock is dry and hot, it’s sunny. If rock is cold and covered with fluffy white layer, it’s snowing.”

Similarly, I saw this in a recent Bloomberg article: “The best way to keep pace with the S&P last year would have been a strategy that rotated between sectors based on the macro headlines,” said David Spika, fund manager at Westwood Holdings in Dallas.

That sounds a lot like “if rock is wet, it’s raining.” The elegance of simplicity notwithstanding, how do you distinguish the IR chair and your company’s shares in a market moving on whether the rock is wet or not?

One argument says you change your focus. Deemphasize the capital markets and instead get baptized in Dodd-Frank, proxy evolution, say-on-pay and myriad others rules and regulations oozing like molasses through public capital markets. Become a compliance concierge. Well and good. But you’ll be competing with internal and external legal counsel for thought leadership, and I find that the advantage lawyers have is they have law degrees. Continue reading →

Happy New Year! If the holidays this year seemed sweeter, the air more welcome to the well-caroled note, it’s probably because I’ve been quiet for two straight weeks.

And with good reason. The lovely KQ and I winged southward with fellow wayfarers for time over the keel on the cayes and reefs of Belize. At Queens Cayes east off Placencia past the wildlife preserve at Laughing Bird Caye, we found what one friend called “your own Corona commercial.” As the sun faded toward dusk there, we caught this grand view of our boats on Dec 11. Our companions below the surface included this delightful fellow, a spotted eagle ray. The Eagle Ray Club is a good name for a rock band. Continue reading →