Market Structure Insights
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...
February 11, 2015
If reality were measured like stocks in multiples of earnings, how much should we discount it? Alert (and good-looking) reader Karen Quast sent a Feb 8 story from The Atlantic by entrepreneur Nick Hanauer, Amazon investor and founder of aQuantive, acquired by Microsoft for $6.4...
February 4, 2015
Let me go. I don’t want to be your hero. Those words strung together move me now viscerally after seeing the movie Boyhood, in the running at the Academy Awards, as I write, for best of the year. I’m biased by the video for “Hero”...
January 28, 2015
The teeter-totter with the moving fulcrum never caught on. The reason is it wasn’t a teeter-totter, which is simple addition and subtraction, but a calculus problem. The same mathematical hubris afflicted much talk surrounding US economic growth last autumn when it seemed things were booming...
January 21, 2015
I’ve learned lots about politics the last couple weeks. In June 2014, SEC Chair Mary Jo White said: “We must evaluate all issues through the prism of the best interest of investors and the facilitation of capital formation for public companies. The secondary markets exist...