Market Structure Insights
January 11, 2017
Last Sunday treated us to a picture-perfect Santa Monica day. We were there helping investor-relations folks at the NIRI Fundamentals conference understand the stock market. Of it, you probably won’t say to your CFO, “I bet you have no idea how our stock trades.” But...
January 4, 2017
I hit a nerve. What sparked the tempest was my assertion last week that investor-relations professionals can’t be just storytellers when over 80% of trading is not Active investment. (For you investors, it’s why stock-picking is performance-challenged.) It’s not that respondents raged against the machines...
December 28, 2016
“Making investment decisions by looking solely at the fundamentals of individual companies is no longer a viable investment philosophy.” So said Steve Eisman, made famous in Michael Lewis’s book The Big Short, upon shutting down his new investment fund in 2014. Actor Steve Carrell portrayed...
December 21, 2016
The whole market is behaving as though it’s got an Activist shareholder. In a sense it does. More on that in a minute. We track the effects of Activism on trading and investment behaviors both before it’s widely known and afterward. A hallmark of these...
December 14, 2016
We’re in New York hoping to run into Janet Yellen because today the Federal Reserve probably raises rates. In December last year the Fed hiked, and markets jumped – and then imploded. Worst January start ever for the stock market. If you’re not right now...
December 7, 2016
I find myself in an uncomfortable position. I’m siding with a high-frequency trader. There’s a key lesson here for investor-relations professionals about how prices are set, and it dovetails with why the bulk of volume concentrates around the open and close. The title of this...