The Market Structure Map

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January 21, 2026

The number of Large Cap Blend Exchange Traded Funds holding a deal stock dropped 40% in the two months after the announcement. Most investment bankers don’t know that deal stocks can struggle not because investors reject transactions but because they skew from benchmarks – and...

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December 17, 2025

The market isn’t really the market. Yesterday, I told Diane King Hall on Schwab Network that futures are no crystal ball. Cracked myself up with that. I meant signals from futures contracts for benchmarks like the S&P 500 often are wrong.    Why is that?...

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December 10, 2025

I don’t know if it’s better to be the Wildebeest or the Hyena. But there’s safety in the herd. That’s one conclusion from my NIRI Senior Roundtable panel last Thursday with Simplify Asset Management chief strategist Mike Green (who is now also the economics rockstar...

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December 3, 2025

Where is the money coming from? It’s the question Karen and I had down in Cabo ahead of Thanksgiving as we observed the hillsides overlooking the Sea of Cortez now festooned with elegant homes. It wasn’t that way the last time I visited 25 years...

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August 20, 2025

I was the odd man out. I joined over a hundred investor-relations colleagues in Dallas last week for the NIRI Southwest Regional Conference (great work, chapter team led by Brook Wooton!). I was the only person talking about the trend in our addressable market. More...

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July 16, 2025

Does the book by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” highlight the fundamental flaw in AI? The definition of heuristic (a key Tversky Kahneman topic) is, paraphrasing, pragmatic problem-solving, subject to vagary and error. One could say that eliminating vagary and error...

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