The Market Structure Map
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...
March 26, 2014
March 19, 2014
Is you is, or is you ain’t, my constituents? If you know cinema’s Coen Brothers and the epically hilarious 2000 movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou,” you’re smiling. You remember the scene, the southern accent. In geopolitics, a sweeping referendum last weekend reunited Crimea with...
March 12, 2014
The humans are the minority. A three-month study of internet traffic by web-security firm Incapsula found that 61.5% of page views were generated by machines. Humans managed only 38.5% of web traffic. It seems absurd but our own experience bears it out. We receive hundreds...
March 5, 2014
Not though the soldier knew someone had blundered. Alfred Tennyson’s 1854 poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” offers lines more recognized than this one above including “into the valley of death rode the six hundred,” and “theirs not to reason why, theirs but to...
February 26, 2014
It’s got to stop. Warren Buffett said so. Until the Wall Street Journal’s Scott Patterson broke the story recently, most investor-relations professionals were unaware that Berkshire Hathaway unit Business Wire took fees from high-speed firms in trade for early delivery of news. It provoked outrage...