Market Structure Insights
June 10, 2015
The equity market is like Mark Twain said. The trouble ain’t what people don’t know, it’s what they know that ain’t so. Thus did Sam Clemens articulate the difference between the price of ignorance and the consequence of arrogance. I thought about this distinction a...
June 3, 2015
The midday equity-market silence is deafening. Writing for the Wall Street Journal last week, Dan Strumpf roiled capital-markets constituents describing how stock-trading is now focused around the opening bell and the last half-hour, with volume dribbling otherwise. NYSE strategists are now contemplating a midday auction....
May 27, 2015
Memorial Day is a time for reflection. We marked it by viewing American Sniper, introspective cinema on prolonged war. There comes a point along that continuum where people begin to feel helpless, caught by something they can neither fix nor change. That of course got...
May 20, 2015
Investor-relations is an itinerant profession. We’re on the road a lot. If you’ve had one of those three-hour flights, say from Denver to Atlanta, in a cramped regional jet (we’ve vowed to avoid them but United interdicts our solemn ecclesiastical commitments), you may utter profanities....
May 13, 2015
“Management wants answers when we don’t trade with our peers.” This is a lyric from a song by the rock band Smart Beta. Just kidding. But Smart Beta is as good a rock-band name as One Direction and each begets the other in the stock...
May 6, 2015
Whether public companies are winning in the stock market comes down to basis points. The Buttonwood Agreement formulating the US public equity market in 1792 affirmed in two terse sentences that its parties would charge a quarter-point commission. Last weekend Jason Zweig wrote about “May...