Market Structure Insights

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March 8, 2023

My grandparents never had a mortgage or car-payment. It’s a lesson on the stock market. Really, Quast? You’re dragging your grandparents into market structure? Well, I’m on a NIRI Virtual Chapter panel today at noon ET about the SEC’s four gargantuan regulatory disgorgements, so yeah....

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March 1, 2023

“Our strategy,” said the investor-relations officer to the chief financial officer, “is to target the bottom part of the graph here.” See image, from the Investment Company Institute’s 2022 Factbook. “Hm,” said the CFO. “Looks like we need a new plan.” Yes, our profession needs...

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February 22, 2023

What if everyone is wrong? That’s a lyric from Sheryl Crow’s “Letter to God” on the 2005 Wildflower album. The context for Ms. Crow was the great existential question, “What happens when we die?” I’m writing about market structure and, by extension, economics. God, market...

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February 15, 2023

What odds are tolerable to you? If you’re betting – I don’t but follow me – you might take a longshot. Low odds, big returns. But in investor-relations we’re playing with house money. It belongs to shareholders. The odds that we can grow shareholder-value by...

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February 8, 2023

Jay Powell reads fiction and plays guitar. Interviewer David Rubenstein, a founder of The Carlyle Group, was downright funny talking to the Federal Reserve chair yesterday. He said, “Your hair is pretty short for a guitar player.” He also asked Mr. Powell if he ever...

Steamboat Jan 31 2023
February 1, 2023

There’s what the money expects, and what it doesn’t. It’s like the weather. We expected winter in Steamboat. We did not expect 50 inches of snow in the last storm, 120 inches in January alone, and 311 inches for the season already (our 30-year seasonal...

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