The Market Structure Map
March 18, 2020
In crises I think of Winston Churchill who said, “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Let’s start now with lessons from a health crisis that became a market...
March 13, 2020
My email inbox took such a fusillade of stock volatility halts yesterday that I set two rules to sort them automatically. Emails rained in well after the close, girders triggered hours before and stuck in an overwhelmed system. As I write, volatility halts Mon-Thu this...
March 11, 2020
We’ve written of risks in stocks from proliferating Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). We’ve talked long about liquidity risks, here last October with CNBC’s Brian Sullivan. So what, right? The market has functioned well in this Coronavirus Pandemonium, argue regulators and reporters (WSJ subscription required). What’s...
March 4, 2020
I fear the Coronavirus may cause us to miss the real clanging claxon the past two weeks: The stock market cannot handle any form of truth. The viral threat is market structure. That the market plummeted on yesterday’s surprise (shocking) Federal Reserve rate-cut, the first...
February 26, 2020
I apologize. Correlation between the market’s downward lurch and Karen’s and my return Sunday from the Arctic Circle seems mathematically irrefutable. Shoulda stayed in Helsinki. I wouldn’t have minded more time in the far reaches of Sweden and Finland viewing northern lights, sleeping in the...
February 12, 2020
Does it matter where stock-trades occur, investors and public companies? It does to the stock exchanges. The explosion in passive investing has driven trades toward the last price of the day, found in stock-exchanges’ closing auctions. Why? Index and Exchange-Traded Funds need to track a...