Don’t pass Go.  I will give $200 to the first person who correctly answers two questions.

Only corporate IROs may answer. Apologies to the rest, but you’ll see why. Corporate IR pros, look up and write down your trading volume on March 4. First question: Where did your shares trade?

Second question: Which brokers executed the trades that, when added up, equaled that volume you wrote down for March 4?

Yesterday, Dow Jones reporter Jacob Bunge wrote about our drive to organize companies to petition Congress and regulators for more transparent data about their share-trading.

There’s a landing page on our website for the letter we’ve drafted. Our goal is to list 100 companies as supporters when we deliver this letter. It should be 5,500. I’ll tell you why in a moment. Continue reading →

You might think “OTC” stands for “off the charts,” which is how we’d rate both the skiing in Winter Park last week and the 70-degree temperatures in Denver Sunday that allowed me to get a post-skiing tan on the back deck.

Actually, OTC stands for “over the counter.” It describes brokers doing business directly with each other, and it’s a big reason why NYSE Euronext and the Deutsche Bourse (everybody spells it differently) are merging.

Our friend David Weild, former vice-chair at the Nasdaq and current market-structure expert at Grant Thornton said of the impending deal: “Scale, scale, scale.” Duncan Niederauer, expected to lead the combined entity, said today: “This is an industry that lends itself to scale.” It seems that what began here in 1792 under the Buttonwood Tree at the foot of Wall Street is at an end of sorts. Why?

Businesses need scale when markets are commoditized and currencies debased. But beyond that, it’s the result of monumental revitalization of the over-the-counter market. Big brokers are trading with each other, avoiding exchanges. And because they are experts at managing risk, institutions choose them not just for execution but as counterparties for transferring risk from asset class to asset class. This is fast becoming the main reason that natural liquidity – trading lingua franca for shares not driven by high-speed intermediaries – moves around. Continue reading →

A note on trading today: The dollar dropped out of the gate this morning, buoying stocks. Talk about soft dollars. The price of shares is a construct of the Fed at present.

Anyway, after sharing the Hyatt in downtown Seattle with the Kansas City Chiefs (convincing victors Sunday), we returned to Denver Monday, body-scanned once but otherwise briskly processed through airport security. So we’re a day late with The Map.

Speaking of body scans, the SEC’s current insider-trading probe is poking at the squishy Wall Street practice of rebating trading costs with “soft dollars.” We should know about soft dollars in the IR profession. Chances are, the last sizeable institutional position taken in your stock involved them. Continue reading →

Boy, when it rains, it pours. Three years ago when we began grousing about how Reg NMS was turning equity trading into a foot race, people thought we’d been hitting the Hookah. Now it’s on 60 Minutes.

Along with Larry Leibowitz from the NYSE and Minoj Narang of Tradeworx, 60 Minutes interviewed Joe Saluzzi from Themis Trading (read their white papers about trading). Joe was on my panel about modern trading at NIRI National in 2009. Few people are better at explaining the peccadilloes of a market structure based on price and speed.

Here again is the problem, simplified to its most basic elements: Trades must meet at the best bid or offer. The participants able to get to the price fastest will always set the price. And because the exchanges and regulators alike have embraced a “maker/taker” model in place of the old auction and automated quotation systems, transient money is always setting your price. Yes, it requires the presence of something else underneath it, as the Flash Crash illustrated. But the structure, not the behavior, is the problem. The behavior is precisely what one would expect from the existing structure. Continue reading →

Denver is an icebox, so we went east to New York to warm up. Lovely here, the tree glittering at Rockefeller Center and the snowflakes magically materializing to music on the Saks & Co. façade. Festive!

Carmen Barone and the Barclays team graciously hosted me yesterday on the NYSE trading floor, and in the afternoon Marge Wywras at Knight Capital Group turned me loose with the traders on the Knight floor in Jersey City. That’s darned near a perfect business day to me. Continue reading →