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 →

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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I’m moderating the NIRI Virtual Chapter meeting on modern equity markets tomorrow 12/1 at noon ET. See nirivirtual.org for details.

As I move the midsection flab from a grand Thanksgiving holiday aside to get at the keyboard (a little humor there), the US equity markets are closing up again. IR folks and executives, what’s proving the most accurate indicator of market direction lately? And what’s it mean to your own market structure?

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Mother Nature and Denver last week were like a samba episode of Dancing with the Stars, twirling furiously. In fact, snow torpedoed my trip to Boston, but only after an hour floundering through a foot of slush to the airport at an average speed of 25 mph. And today it’s 70 degrees on the Front Range.

Switching gears, I owe a mea culpa. We’ve berated the exchanges for fueling conditions that constrain real investment – fragmentation, rebates, direct access, sponsored access, high-frequency trading, flash orders etc, et al, since data and transactions are keys to exchange prosperity. But Duncan Niederauer’s interview in the weekend Wall Street Journal (see link below) was the best call yet for return to capital formation in the equity markets. I am now cooking up a comfort-food casserole of crow in the crock pot.  I did drop a note to Mr. Niederauer saying so, too.

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A word on the markets: options expired last week, while swaps and counterparty agreements pegged to volatility measures lapse tomorrow. Speculation and risk management trading are high as a result. If you expect your stock to behave as though everybody buying and selling it acts on fundamentals, you’ll encounter the unexpected.

The NYSE and Charles Schumer were talking today about rules for dark pools. The NYSE is partnered with dark-pool operator Liquidnet and is building a massive high-speed trading facility in New Jersey. The Nasdaq meanwhile plans to launch an exchange next year that will give priority to orders of size, to compete with the size advantage dark-pool operators offer.

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