Market Structure Insights
March 25, 2015
What do you get paid to do? That’s the question the SEC may soon pose to high-frequency traders, according to a story from Bloomberg yesterday. “The maker-taker compensation model is very much in the core of what our market structure review folks are looking at,”...
March 18, 2015
Some energy-sector clients lost 40% of market-capitalization in three days last October. A year and a half cultivating share-appreciation and by Wednesday it’s gone. How so? To get there let’s take a trip. I love driving the Llano Estacado, in Spanish “palisaded steppe” or the...
March 11, 2015
Why do you need an exchange? Between the Tiber River and the Piazza del Quirinale in Rome sit the remains of Trajan’s Market, built around 100 AD by that Roman emperor famed for militaristically expanding the empire to its zenith. Considered the world’s first covered...
March 4, 2015
Those of you in Boston, we visited accidentally this week. Flying into LaGuardia Sunday afternoon, Mother Nature had thrown up a snowy blockade, and running low on fuel after an hour circling like a speedway pace car, we diverted to Logan. Thanks for the gas....
February 25, 2015
In 1884, British comedian Arthur Roberts invented a card game of trickery and nonsense for which he coined the name “Spoof.” In 2015, spoofing is a decidedly unfunny and ostensibly illegal trading technique in securities markets. But the joke may be on us. Mr. Roberts...
February 18, 2015
How often do traders know news before you release it? I was in the car listening to a business program on satellite radio, and they were talking about crazy moves in shares ahead of news. The host, a trader and money manager, said, “Even with...