Would you rather ride your road bike in the sun or the rain?

What if riding in the sun means peddling across Death Valley in the summer, while the rain is a passing shower in the Italian Dolomites?

Context is essential. Let’s apply the same thinking to decisions about stock-repurchases and dividends. Conventional wisdom has long held that both actions appeal to the kinds of stock buyers who hold securities and count on fundamentals.

No argument there. But ponder the third dimension in the IR chair. The first dimension is your story – what defines and differentiates your investment thesis. The second is targeting the kind of money that likes your story. The third dimension is the state of your equity store.

Your equity is a product, competing with other products, with unique supply and demand constraints. If you suppose that your story is correct for a particular buyer without considering whether the buyer can act on interest in your story, you’re leaving money on the table. So to speak.

For instance, if I want four Keith Urban tickets at Pepsi Center in October for no more than $50 each, I’m already sold on the investment thesis – “Keith Urban puts on a good show.” What if there are only two tickets available at $50? Well, I’m not the right buyer for the investment thesis, then. Continue reading →

Coming to NIRI National 2011 next week? Please visit us at Booth 304! We have no helicopter rides or trips to the Bahamas to give, but we do have a really cool microfiber for keeping those ubiquitous touchscreen pads and smartphones sharp.

June launched by kicking markets right in the rump. We blamed economic data. It’s true but not that simple. Behind the data at the behavioral level, institutions decided against equities roughly May 13. We don’t make this up, we just observe it in the way trades execute. When methodologies, purposes or time horizons change, it manifests in trade executions.

Money didn’t hedge with options expirations May 18-20 either. If you decide not to insure your house against loss, what might that mean? That you expect to sell it shortly, that risk is nonexistent, or that insurance is too darned expensive. As an analogy, two of those three are negatives and the middle one doesn’t exist on Wall Street.

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What if some mathematical calculations in the market are just there to get a reaction?

Traders have not to my knowledge named them “Charlie Sheen.” But alert reader Walt Schuplak at the Market Intelligence Group in New York sent an item about rogue algorithms. Our friend Joe Saluzzi at Themis Trading wrote on it yesterday.

Joe explains that certain trading practices create arbitrage opportunity. Profiting from divergence isn’t bad of itself, Joe notes. But if the chance to profit is fostered where divergence could not or would not occur on its own, it raises fundamental questions.

Bloomberg writer Nina Mehta wrote today about the Australian government’s initial rejection of the Singapore Exchange’s effort to buy the Oz stock market. Singapore is a shareholder-owned exchange. The Deutsche Bourse is public. Same with the InterContinental Exchange, throwing in with the Nasdaq on a bid for the NYSE, both of which are public too. The London and Toronto markets are run by public companies. BATS may IPO. Continue reading →

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.

The late standup comedian Mitch Hedberg said: “A severed foot is the ultimate stocking stuffer.”

I’m not sure that’s funny. But it segues to the stock market. So let me tell you a story about a severed foot in a sock.

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