Market Structure Insights
March 14, 2018
Our good friends at Themis Trading wrote last week about a $14 million settlement between the NYSE and the SEC over a series of violations. Why care, issuers and investors? Suppose nobody told you the road you take daily to work sat atop a growing...
March 7, 2018
I can’t find a team (men’s or women’s) headed to March Madness, the annual collegiate sports fete in the USA, wearing green and purple. But the market’s awash in them. Don’t you mean red and green, Tim? Buy and selling? No, green and purple. See...
February 28, 2018
“It’s like the market has become some uncontrollable machine lurching around,” said friend Pat at the NIRI Rocky Mountain chapter meeting last week. I spoke there about Exchange Traded Funds and how they contribute to market instability through the slow adjustment of collateral for creating...
February 21, 2018
Who remembers EF Hutton? When EF Hutton talks, people listen. That slogan crafted by Hutton’s William Clayton, who died in 2013, and now-defunct advertising agency Benton & Bowles, wasn’t about a man but a firm. Ads ran in the 70s and 80s where characters would...
February 14, 2018
The market’s Valentine’s Day gift is VIX expirations today. It might be no more than a flirtatious glance toward investors but there’s reason for wariness. It kicks off the February series of expirations for derivatives today through Friday, with then a market holiday next Monday,...
February 7, 2018
One definition of “volatile” is “passing off readily in the form of vapor.” Through yesterday, XIV, the exchange-traded security representing a one-day swap from Credit Suisse and offered by VelocityShares, had seen 94% of its value vaporized. It triggered a technical provision in the fund’s...