If you appeal a parking ticket to the Parking Department, what’s your expectation of objectivity? The Parking Department collects revenues.

Which brings us to word circulating last week from CEO Duncan Niederauer that NYSE Euronext and other exchanges are confronting the growing problem of off-exchange trading. “It impacts the quality and integrity of the U.S. capital market – and ultimately the ability of markets to enable companies like yours to raise capital efficiently,” Niederaur wrote in a letter to issuers (which a variety of alert readers passed along to me).

Shouldn’t we first ask why money has fled displayed markets? Private equity is working great. It’s a non-displayed market. Pensions and endowments have nearly twice as much money in private equity than public equity today. Investors aren’t forced to transact off the exchanges. They choose to.

Now exchanges want regulators to herd them back to displayed markets…for your good? Or for theirs? There’s a biblical proverb that says, “The first to present his case seems right, until another comes forward to question him.”

I think fragmented markets are a problem. But the reason the NYSE and other exchanges want trading between brokers to move back to exchanges isn’t for capital-formation purposes. It’s because the NYSE and other exchanges are data and technology vendors. NYSE Technologies last year generated $473 million of revenue supplying data, circuits and technologies to those trading your shares. Continue reading →

Don’t forget to write your letters, folks!

Which letters? See last week’s Market Structure Map on prompting the NYSE or the NASDAQ to file a rule for better data.

Speaking of rule-filings, here’s an example. Last week ahead of an SEC review deadline, NYSE Arca, an automated facility focused on ETFs and global derivatives-trading, withdrew a proposal permitting ETF sponsors to pay market-makers to trade ETFs.

Filed in April last year, the proposal is similar to one from the NASDAQ on which we commented. We opposed it because these plans distort prices and true supply and demand. If you were paying brokers to buy and sell your shares, would your share-price reflect the views of investors or the market-incentive offered by payments to brokers?

At best, it would be hard to tell. Plus, if a party with a financial incentive to create demand for its product can manipulate outcomes for its own gain, it’s sometimes called racketeering when prosecuted criminally. Why would we permit something that in one place is considered criminal to in another one serve as a barometer for market demand?

Despite this logical conundrum, word is that NYSE Arca will reformulate and re-file the proposal. The NASDAQ’s proposal supporting sponsor payments for ETF traders is still matriculating, and the SEC must decide on it by March 8, according to Traders Magazine. Continue reading →

What surprised me most was how twice as many people knew “high-frequency trading” compared to “dark pools.”

The Nasdaq’s Mike Sokoll, Liquidnet’s Nicole Olson and I kicked off a session on how equity markets work at NIRI’s conference on IR fundamentals in Santa Monica yesterday. As we were unfolding the map of market behavior, we polled the audience:

How many of you have heard of “high-frequency trading?”

It appeared to me that two-thirds of the hands in the room went up, and there were between 80-100 investor-relations and treasury professionals in the ballroom at the Loews Beach Hotel.

And yes. It was lovely there, above Muscle Beach (I walked from the sandy side of the hotel to the front for a cab back to the airport, five minutes in the lovely January sea air in suit and tie).

When we asked how many had heard of dark pools, only a third said so. That may change soon. One big reason more people know about high-frequency trading is that the media have given it ink. Yesterday, FINRA announced plans to scrutinize dark pools over whether gaming occurs, where traders may post orders on stock exchanges that create arbitrage opportunity in members-only markets where no price information is offered (dark pools).

Which leads us to IR 101 in 2013. I was trading notes recently with a friend and fellow IR veteran about the Nasdaq buying Thomson Financial and The ICE buying the NYSE, and we got to talking about what’s changed and what hasn’t in our profession.

Fifteen years ago it was 1998. eBay went public Sept 24 and closed up 163% at $47.38 (raising $63 million on 3.5 million shares offered). IR pros were doing the Big Four (positioning their companies in the capital markets, shaping internal and external financial communications, building capital-markets relationships, monitoring how equity is traded). Continue reading →

No, our title does not refer to Surveillance.  Despite the Thomson/Nasdaq deal last week.

Yesterday mavens of equity markets converged on Capitol Hill to debate trading woes. Apparently the Senate, unsatisfied with just one geological trope (“Fiscal Cliff”), must examine “Dark Pools.”

If you missed the news, we’ll summarize. On the Hill, leaders from the big exchanges argued that operators of trading facilities that don’t post prices and which may select which parties can participate in buying and selling are harmful to investors who want to know the true price and supply of stocks.

As you may know, “dark pools” are markets where equity traders may find shares without having to post a price, thus avoiding actions that might move market pricing or draw attention to orders. The price for shares in dark pools is determined by whatever price is best at the exchanges.

Exchanges naturally feel a bit like Best Buy in an internet world. You’re using our liquidity and our prices to determine what you can get at another market.

For their part, dark-pool operators including Credit Suisse (runs the world’s largest dark pool, Crossfinder) and ITG (operates POSIT) countered that markets are ill-served by an exchange oligopoly that writes its own rules, regulates itself and earns some $450 million in shared data revenue off the consolidated tape that is in effect a government-granted monopoly.

It’s akin to knowing that no matter what you do, if you match up trades at a certain pace you’ll earn a profit on data because it’s guaranteed – almost like rate-of-return utilities. Dark pools think that’s a whopping tradeoff for setting prices everybody else uses.

Joe Mecane, head of NYSE equities, made the point of the day though. The nature of markets fostered by rules has “created unnecessary complexity and mistrust of markets,” Mecane said. He wants Congress to simplify it. Continue reading →

Boo!

What a Halloween week. To our many friends, clients and colleagues on the Atlantic seaboard assailed by Hurricane Sandy, we in Denver are rushing sunshine your direction.

Exchanges are hoping for sunshine too as trading resumes. It hinges on opening auctions. That gives us the creepy-crawlies, as though black cats were crisscrossing ahead as we ducked from ladder to ladder to avoid the falling sky.

Why? BATS Exchange saw its IPO torpedoed when the opening auction went awry. Flaws in the Facebook opening auction at the Nasdaq delayed quotes, and the fiasco lingers in recriminations and lawsuits. Knight Capital Group had bad software derail an algorithm hitting opening auctions.

We should note “closing auctions” too, since trading days begin and end with them. Some, like the Nasdaq, call them the opening and closing “cross” – not as though it’s catechism but because of what happens.

As Sandy stomped through Long Island Sound, the big equity exchanges including NYSE, Nasdaq, Direct Edge and BATS, were plotting how to get a good auction going today to restart markets dormant since Friday.

Now, stay with me. We have one aim: To explain why the Halloween auction is vital – and risky – and why auctions are both linchpins to price-discovery and the market’s Achilles Heel. Continue reading →