Market Structure Insights

April 29, 2015

What’s the purpose of life? We want simple answers to complex questions.  Such as when management asks why the stock price is up or down. Since elementary explanations are often incorrect, there’s been a loss of confidence.  “We broke through our moving averages” wears thin...

April 22, 2015

Apparently the market is very unstable. This is the message regulators are unwittingly sending with news yesterday that UK futures trader Navinder Singh Sarao working from home in West London has been arrested for precipitating an epochal US stock-market crash. On May 6, 2010, the...

April 15, 2015

Happy Tax Day!  Don’t you wish you could be somewhere else? Sit at Saba Rock looking north where beyond the earth’s curvature lies Anegada and you know why Richard Branson embraced the British Virgin Islands. We did too, abandoning electronics including in my case a...

April 8, 2015

EDITORIAL NOTE: Richard Branson says hello!  Well, I imagine he would if we bumped into him here off Necker Island on the gloriously azure plane of the Caribbean Sea snuggling against the British Virgin Islands. Today would’ve been my father’s 80th birthday had he lived...

April 1, 2015

I saw this definition for the word “study”:  The act of texting, eating and watching TV with a textbook nearby. Modern trading markets can cause investor-relations to seem like a nearby textbook, as the following guest commentary illustrates (and that’s no April Fools’ joke). Special...

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,”...

Want to know your Passive characteristics? How to rethink your earnings reporting cycle?