Market Structure Insights
May 18, 2016
Everybody adapts, including institutional investors like Janus. Rattle off a top-ten list of the best active stock pickers visited by teams of company execs and investor-relations pros trundling through the airports and cities of America, and Denver’s Janus likely makes the cut. Ah, but. In...
May 11, 2016
“Measure the performance of equity securities in the top 85% by market capitalization of equity securities listed on stock exchanges in the United States.” I made it a sentence here but I clipped that phrase from a Blackrock iShares “minimum volatility” Smart Beta Exchange Traded...
May 4, 2016
You’ve heard the phrase split-second decision? For high-speed traders that would be akin to the plod of a government bureaucracy or the slow creep of a geological era. Half a second (splitting it) is 500 milliseconds. One millisecond equals a thousand microseconds. One microsecond is...
April 27, 2016
My friend’s dad joked that kids are the most destructive force in the universe. For stocks, the most powerful (and sometimes destructive) force is the movement of the dollar. The Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan both meet today so it could soar or...
April 20, 2016
Imagine you were driving and your throttle stuck. Our market Sentiment gauge, the ModernIR 10-pt Behavioral Index (MIRBI) has manifested like a jammed accelerator, remaining above neutral (signaling gains) since Feb 19. At Apr 15 it was still 5.4, just over the 5.3 reading at...
April 13, 2016
If someone says he’s going to make water, it means one thing. If he says he’s providing liquidity, it means another. We should clear (and perhaps clean) that up. In the stock market, some firms call themselves “liquidity providers.” The term suggests they’re creating something...