Market Structure Insights
May 29, 2013
“If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” This witty dictum by Herb Stein, father of Ben Stein (yes, from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Wonder Years, Win Ben Stein’s Money and TV in general), is called Stein’s Law. It elucidates why stocks and...
May 22, 2013
If you won the lottery, what would you do? What about the IR lottery? If you could have anything you wanted, know any detail, command any price, possess every tool, what would you most wish for in the IR chair? It’s a darned good corporate...
May 15, 2013
Whole swaths of stocks moved 3% yesterday. You might thank Dodd-Frank for it, even if David Tepper gets credit (if you heard the Appaloosa Management founder’s interview you know what I mean). To understand how, ever heard of a Rube Goldberg Machine? It’s an unnecessarily...
May 8, 2013
If you appeal a parking ticket to the Parking Department, what’s your expectation of objectivity? The Parking Department collects revenues. Which brings us to word circulating last week from CEO Duncan Niederauer that NYSE Euronext and other exchanges are confronting the growing problem of off-exchange...
May 1, 2013
What if we forecasted the weather on temperature moving-averages? It would seem silly. After all, ENIAC ran the first mathematical computations for a weather model in 1950. ENIAC is not an Icelandic singer. It’s the first true computer and was built by University of Pennsylvania...
April 24, 2013
We assume investors know how markets work. What if they don’t? Patrick Armstrong, new president of the Securities Traders Association of New York (STANY), told Traders Magazine yesterday that the buyside has been absent from the market-structure debate. What debate? If you joined the IR...