The Market Structure Map
May 7, 2014
You’ve heard of 99-year leases? Karen’s grandfather has had an exceptional lease on life. We were in Nashville last weekend as he marked the calendar a 99th time. Remarkably, in his lifetime headlines have been made by WWI, inventor Nikola Tesla, the Great Depression (he...
April 30, 2014
There’s a joke software engineers tell. There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who can count in binary and those who can’t. Nerd jokes (no offense, technology friends!) are often neither immediately nor apparently funny. But the point is binary understanding, a...
April 23, 2014
“People are getting screwed because they can’t imagine a microsecond.” Well, how about $1 trillion? Can we imagine that? If you want context for the quote, read Michael Lewis’s book, Flash Boys (No. 1 now in NY Times nonfiction). Equally relevant and lost in the...
April 16, 2014
Suppose the engine of your vehicle was on fire. The logical response would be to shut it off. But what if you were traveling at highway speed and killing the fuel supply meant you had no power breaks or steering? What if your vehicle was...
April 9, 2014
It’s all in the recovery. That’s the philosophy put forth by a friend of mine for dealing with unpleasant facts. I think the chief reason for the recent swoon in stocks was not anemia in the job market but a sort of investor outrage. You...
April 2, 2014
I don’t skateboard. But the title of Michael Lewis’s new book on high-speed trading, Flash Boys, made me think Lewis could’ve called it DC-town & Flash Boys. Legendary skateboarder Stacy Peralta directed the 2001 documentary Dogtown & Z-boys chronicling the meteoric rise of a craze...