Oscar Wilde said that illusion is the first of all pleasures. Of course he also wrote that anyone who lives within his means suffers from a lack of imagination.

Buttressed on either side with those brackets about illusion and means, let’s look today at what’s afflicting our market and why some institutions like transient trading when others don’t.

Vanguard, an institutional investor focused on passively managed funds, supports high-frequency trading. George Sauter, CIO for the Vanguard Group, wrote in the firm’s comment letter to the SEC on market structure that high-frequency volumes reduce trading costs through competition and tighter spreads. He quantifies the benefit to investors at roughly 10% over a decade. A passive fund providing 9% returns per annum would deliver only 8% returns without HFT. Continue reading →

“The CFO wants to know why our stock is down when it should be up.”

That’s the essence of conversations I had yesterday with two investor-relations officers. It’s tempting to suggest asking Al Gore about why things that should be up are instead down. But that’s an old joke. And it won’t make you more valuable in the IR chair.

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We were on the bikes at dawn in Denver where on the oval at Washington Park it was 45 degrees as the sun rose.  That’ll wake you up!

Speaking of waking up, did you read Sebastian Mallaby’s article in the weekend Wall Street Journal called “Learning to Love Hedge Funds?” Going back to the first hedge fund in 1949, run by Alfred Jones, Mallaby contends that hedge funds represent the optimal risk-management model.  Government tries to prevent bad things from happening. Hedge funds, where owners put their money at risk and earn returns when profits are produced, view risk as a pathway to opportunity, but one marked by prudent insurance, or hedges, against downside.  Jones produced cumulative returns of 5,000% from 1949-1968, Mallaby notes. Continue reading →

Sorry to keep you waiting two extra days this week! We were in San Diego, where June Gloom outside contrasted with the festive mood filling the Manchester Grand Hyatt for NIRI National 2010, the annual gathering of IR professionals.

Attendance jumped from last year. A few new firms joined the lineup on the boulevards in the exhibit hall. One first-time attendee working in corporate governance said as we sat by the fire pit Monday night and watched the party crowd and the live band and the oddity of the evening, a young woman rolling around on the pool in a giant see-through inflated ball, “You NIRI folks are the nicest conference goers I’ve ever met.” Continue reading →

REMINDERS: We’ll be bivouacked for NIRI National in booth 321 on the exhibit floor at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego next week. Stop by! Also, clients, come see us for Happy Hour on Sunday at Busters Beach House. We’ll kick things off.

Speaking of conversations best had around adult beverages, no doubt many of you have laid awake nights wondering, “How does relative value arbitrage work, and should I care?”

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