March 12, 2025
In Clint Eastwood’s 1992 movie Unforgiven, the scrolling script claims his character William Munny is of “notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition.” Rather like the stock...
March 5, 2025
Tariffs don’t just – boom! Rock the market. There must be a condition precedent. We’ve seen it before with the Federal Reserve. The Fed says,...
February 26, 2025
It’s been a long time since the Flash Crash. So long in fact that heads of investor relations and chief investment officers of funds have...
February 19, 2025
Some stocks are killing it. A bunch aren’t. Jon Sindreu at the Wall Street Journal called it an “Investing Riddle” (subscription required) that stocks in...
February 12, 2025
Why do sellsiders cover beta? Quast, you’re like a Kendrick Lamar rap: inscrutable. Let me speak English. NVDA, the most widely held stock and a...
February 5, 2025
“Really? That’s all the time you spent?” I said,”Yessir. It doesn’t take long to pull weeds.” I think I was twelve. The mailman had suggested...
January 29, 2025
DeepSeek would be a great name for a rock band. As would Rapeseed, an alternative offered by the helpful Whole Foods staff when I asked...
January 22, 2025
A headline at Bloomberg from Jan 13, 2025, reads: I was a Wall Street Analyst. They are Irrelevant. The article by opinion columnist Shuli Ren...
January 15, 2025
January 8, 2025
We were in Nashville and Keith Urban wished us a happy new year. If you like country music, that’s a good start to 2025. More...
December 18, 2024
Willie Nelson plays Johnny Dean in the 1997 Barry Levinson movie Wag the Dog, who is hired to write a patriotic song as part of...
December 11, 2024
Microsoft is in 766 Exchange Traded Funds including a Utilities ETF. It’s in about a third of the nearly 1,800 domestic equity ETFs comprising a...
December 4, 2024
What’s the price of your stock? It matters because the SEC has adopted final rules to redefine a “round lot.” Currently a round lot is...
November 20, 2024
Nvidia (NVDA) reports results today after the market closes, like thousands of public companies in the last couple weeks trying to generate alpha. The difference...
November 13, 2024
November 6, 2024
We’re back! Karen and I left for Spain last month, where outside Girona I rode bikes with good friend Brent and our pro-cyclist guide, Arno....
October 16, 2024
Options expire and renew starting today and running through Tuesday, the last chance for big hedges and bets on the US presidential election. We could...
October 9, 2024
Forbes Magazine wrote in Feb 2009 that Warren Buffett is said to have observed, “You pay a very high price in the stock market for...
October 2, 2024
On Buffalo Pass, autumn blazes. In fact, there are a lot of things ablaze, with another earnings season looming. Will you report results the same...
September 25, 2024
Tundra is spongy. So are stocks. Somebody facile with words is Peter Heller. Karen and I met him at a book-signing in Steamboat Springs. Things...
September 18, 2024
Stocks are up. So are the number of trades and the amount of volume that’s short. But trade-size has plunged. The stock market is up...
September 11, 2024
On May 22, fees charged by the SEC on trading rose 248%. It’s not widely understood that the fees from initial public offerings, follow-on and...
September 4, 2024
Why does the stock market all at once lurch like a drunk and take out a row of planter boxes containing semiconductor stocks? Public companies,...
August 28, 2024
They’ve been running the Palio in Siena officially since 1482 but the history goes further back. We were walking through the Lupa Contrada on the...
August 7, 2024
Copernicus could help us pick stocks. In a sense, anyway. I’ll explain. Now, I don’t know what’s going to happen next. We did, however,...
July 31, 2024
What about the stock market can we believe? You can’t believe prices. At least, during the day. If you’re a trader, how do you know...
July 24, 2024
Vice President Calvin Coolidge assumed the Presidency of the United States on the death of President Harding and completed that term and was then elected...
July 17, 2024
The Dow Industrials gained 742 points yesterday. Randomly. The rest of the market was pedestrian. The trouble for issuers and investors alike is the comparisons. ...
July 10, 2024
It’s worth stopping whatever you’re doing and observing what’s occurring on the planet. In South Africa, the African National Congress is out for the first...
July 3, 2024
There’s a moat between haves and have-nots in the stock market. The S&P 500 Equal Weight Index that treats the 500 components the same is...
June 26, 2024
Why are the Nasdaq and the Dow Jones Industrial Average diverging wildly? It might resolve in the next few days. But it’s not small. Back...
June 19, 2024
One of our customers at EDGE calculated that 82% of Demand in the S&P 500 is from three stocks (NVDA – now the largest –...
June 12, 2024
High-frequency traders are data-dependent. The Federal Reserve ought not be. I’ll explain. The U.S. central bank today concludes its open-market (FOMC) meeting. Jay Powell speaks. ...
June 5, 2024
Somebody pulled a pin and dropped a grenade in the stock market and nobody noticed. Let me explain: Now, there were explanations. Index options on...
May 29, 2024
Size matters. Does trade-size matter? The average trade in S&P 500 stocks is 87 shares this week (five-day average). Think about that. Quotes are in...
May 22, 2024
It’s tough being a market strategist. Mike Wilson, chief equity strategist for Morgan Stanley, has thrown his bear towel on the laundry pile and lifted...
May 8, 2024
Should a stock like COKE rise 20% in a day? Executives love it, sure. But it’s aberrant behavior at loggerheads with what the dominant money...
May 1, 2024
The cost of fast food has exploded. No, I’m not doing field research. While I’ve got nothing against fast food, it’s generally incompatible with getting...
April 24, 2024
April 10, 2024
You wonder what’s going to happen next. I mean, look around. The South Carolina women ran ruthlessly through everyone, capping a 38-0 season with the...
April 3, 2024
Is impending volatility predictable? Sherlock Holmes would not tell Watson it’s elementary, that’s for sure. But there is a tale behind the tape. Permit me...
March 27, 2024
Vanguard founder Jack Bogle said to own the averages. Index funds. That seed germinated into a tree that filled the investment world. Look at Blackrock....
March 20, 2024
I was walking up Steamboat Springs’s Emerald Mountain with my friend Charlie last week and he said, “Trading volatility is like trading air.” Charlie was...
March 13, 2024
My wife Karen is reading Peter Attia’s book, Outlive, which is like reading it myself. I get the benefit of Karen as filter for tidbits...
March 6, 2024
What the…? Everything was awesome. Monday. Then yesterday, stocks toppled like a thawed corpse in Nederland (inside joke, there). No obvious reason. Some said it...
February 28, 2024
Two things exploded in 2023. Trading in options contracts and illegal US immigration. No, I’m not suggesting they’re correlated! I note it bemusedly. But I...
February 21, 2024
Last week, markets were abuzz over the zero that lifted LYFT. For those who were vacationing or living hermetically and missed it, Lyft reported financial...
February 14, 2024
I’ve got my Valentine, for which I’m grateful every day. Whether the market finds love after yesterday’s blood remains to be seen. Back when the...
February 7, 2024
On Nov 15, 2021, NVDA closed at $345.30 on a hundred million shares of volume. Without context, that information is interesting but unhelpful. I’d note...
January 31, 2024
Consumers are confident. I’m not sure they have all the data. It’s a lesson for public companies. In case you missed it, The Conference Board’s...
January 24, 2024
If I said the name “Sherlock Holmes” to you, what’s your snap response? Probably, “Elementary, my dear Watson.” I have long favored a line by...
January 17, 2024
What do bitcoin Exchange Traded Funds mean for public companies? More competition for those dollars you chase with your story. A number of you emailed...
January 10, 2024
Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 216,000 in December. So said the headline from the Bureau of Labor Statistics in its monthly report on jobs...
January 3, 2024
Will this be the year? Speaking of which, happy New Year! The year for what, you ask? I was reading an Institutional Investor piece yesterday...
December 13, 2023
Anything you say can and will be used against you in the stock market, public companies. By machines. And I don’t mean just that stocks...
December 6, 2023
Demand Signal would be a great name for a rock band. I heard it from Microsoft’s president Brad Smith, who is an attorney, not an...
November 29, 2023
It’s the 159th anniversary – without fanfare – of the Sand Creek Massacre in southeastern Colorado. Karen once accompanied me out to Lamar and up...
November 22, 2023
I have never been more profoundly grateful than I am this Thanksgiving 2023. I wish you the season’s blessings, and gratefulness. Prudence doesn’t hurt either....
November 15, 2023
One time in your life, attend a Texas A&M Aggies football game. There’s a lesson. The lesson isn’t that it’s pretty great to get fired...
November 8, 2023
It’s November and I’m in jeans and flip-flops as I was in Denver in July. It’s 75 degrees. But in Aspen last week for a...
October 27, 2023
There are 1,500 companies reporting results this week, a flood of earnings releases all seeking to differentiate a story, a company. At the same...
October 18, 2023
Remember the movie Wag the Dog? Barry Levinson directs, David Mamet (a genius) writes, Robert DeNiro and Dustin Hoffman act. It’s about creating a distraction....
October 11, 2023
Would one expect stocks to rise and oil to fall amidst a declared war in the Mideast? Our hearts, thoughts and prayers go out to...
October 4, 2023
Former SEC chair Mary Jo White once said in a speech, “The stock market exists for investors and issuers, and their interests must be paramount.”...
September 27, 2023
Why is there a 100% spread between SPY and stocks? SPY is the State Street S&P Depository Receipt, called a “spider” for the acronym SPDR,...
September 20, 2023
You’ve heard the joke about economists? You know they’ve got a sense of humor because they use decimal points. The same can be said of...
September 13, 2023
Trend-following works only if the trend holds. Trends are core to technical analysis, the dark art of studying stock charts to divine whether prices will...
September 6, 2023
Everybody else is seeing Barbie and Oppenheimer and we’re just getting around to Avatar: The Way of Water. The sequel to James Cameron’s 2009 film...
August 30, 2023
What if the stock market has tides like the sea? I’ll give you some data – as is my custom. In the past six years,...
August 23, 2023
It’s been a surreal week. We’ve had a life-changing event, a terrifying experience. But it’s going to be okay. Those of you in our close...
August 16, 2023
Karen and I both have Wahoo Element Roam bike computers. We finish a ride and rush to check the data analytics. Feet climbed, average cadence,...
August 9, 2023
The signs are there. What if we’re already in a recession? Before you react, hear me out. Gross Domestic Income, the measure of all the...
August 2, 2023
It’s earnings season, which is like The Palio in Siena. What I mean is it’s a mad scramble, a horse race, a cultural event for...
July 26, 2023
Now it’s getting weird. Companies are asking us why their shares are up. Most times it’s the reverse. Why’s my stock down? It’s a telling...
July 19, 2023
The stock market says the economy is fine. Or does it? I joined Brian Sullivan and Carson Group Management’s Ryan Detrick on Last Call last...
July 12, 2023
Does alpha exist? That was how a hedge-fund executive began a conversation when I was in his office back before the pandemic. He said the...
June 28, 2023
I’m amused. There is a ceaseless stream of people chattering about the economy. On TV. On the web. In print, in digital. Will we have...
June 21, 2023
The Latin word Panacea comes from the Greek “Panakes,” a combination of two words meaning “all healing.” I love the Greeks. Humans love panaceas. Like...
June 14, 2023
There’s no alpha left in public equities. Hasn’t been for 20 years. Nope, not me. I didn’t say it. Marc Rowan, CEO and co-founder of...
June 7, 2023
Should you wear an Apple Virtual Reality headset during earnings calls? Wait, what? Earnings calls? I’ll explain. I remember wondering if Apple would survive. You...
May 31, 2023
Odysseus needed ten years to get home and only his dog recognized him. We were three weeks in Greece (May 3-24) and visited Odysseus’s home...
May 3, 2023
A debt ceiling looms. Three banks are gone now. What to do? We’re going to Greece. No sense waiting for the next banker’s shoe to...
April 26, 2023
Remember the Ford Pinto? (EDITORIAL NOTE: also remember to join tomorrow’s weekly live Demo and discussion for Market Structure EDGE, if spots are still available)....
April 19, 2023
It’s earnings season. And once again the shows on CNBC after the market closes are trying to explain in rational terms why stocks are up...
April 12, 2023
You do the math. Did I tell you that story? I’ll tell it again. Karen called the Wall Street Journal subscription department. This was years...
April 5, 2023
Sometimes you don’t even know what to say. And I’m not talking about politics, geopolitics, the legal system, bills of attainder, the economy, the...
March 29, 2023
Artificial intelligence is all the rage, but you can’t rage against the machines, people. You can only message to them. That’s not quite how the...
March 22, 2023
Do you feel like singing a song by The Who? I’ll tip my hat to the new ConstitutionTake a bow for the new revolutionSmile and...
March 15, 2023
Is the management team of Silicon Valley Bank a confederacy of dunces? I don’t want a cease-and-desist order from the estate of John Kennedy Toole,...
March 8, 2023
My grandparents never had a mortgage or car-payment. It’s a lesson on the stock market. Really, Quast? You’re dragging your grandparents into market structure? Well,...
March 1, 2023
“Our strategy,” said the investor-relations officer to the chief financial officer, “is to target the bottom part of the graph here.” See image, from the...
February 22, 2023
What if everyone is wrong? That’s a lyric from Sheryl Crow’s “Letter to God” on the 2005 Wildflower album. The context for Ms. Crow was...
February 15, 2023
What odds are tolerable to you? If you’re betting – I don’t but follow me – you might take a longshot. Low odds, big returns....
February 8, 2023
Jay Powell reads fiction and plays guitar. Interviewer David Rubenstein, a founder of The Carlyle Group, was downright funny talking to the Federal Reserve chair...
February 1, 2023
There’s what the money expects, and what it doesn’t. It’s like the weather. We expected winter in Steamboat. We did not expect 50 inches of...
January 25, 2023
The NYSE opening auction failed yesterday. Prices gyrated and trading halted in swaths of large caps including XOM, WMT, UL, T, VZ, RTX, MCD, PRU,...
January 18, 2023
There was a country hit 30 years ago called Nobody Wins. Why drag out a 1993 song by Radney Foster? Well, it popped into my...
January 11, 2023
I counted the times “issuer” appears in the SEC’s four new market-structure proposals. Investors and traders (and issuers), should you care? Without issuers, there’s nothing...
January 4, 2023
Cheers! They got it right, and they got it wrong. I’ll explain in a moment. Karen and I took two weeks off from the Market...
December 14, 2022
About 35 seconds after Consumer Price Index data debuted yesterday at 830a ET, Dow Jones futures were up 950 points. What is the stock market...
December 7, 2022
When you’re amid the tulips you don’t know it. Much has been written about the Great 17th Century Dutch Tulip Bulb Mania. I’m not going...
November 30, 2022
Index futures expire today. Well, if you’re reading November 30, that is. I’m flying today from Charleston where we’ve spent the month of November to...
November 23, 2022
The situation leading to the deodorant-lid discovery is unique. We’re in Charleston for the month of November. Yes, it’s dangerous. The odds of getting fat...
November 16, 2022
I don’t own cryptocurrencies or NFTs or other digital assets. Let me just offer that first. But anybody, in any market, including the US stock...
November 9, 2022
The only sport bloodier than the MMA Octagon is politics. And it’s more entertaining! I don’t know what happened election night yet, as I’m writing...
November 2, 2022
Inflation is our fault. For context, the Federal Reserve today will boost rates. The message will be clear: We consumers need to stop consuming, because...
October 26, 2022
Geese are flying over Denver now, headed south. Have you wondered if they poo up there? Well, wonder no more. Karen and I were walking...
October 19, 2022
ModernIR has seen a surge of interest from companies perplexed by the stock market. They see that stocks don’t move with fundamentals, don’t move as...
October 12, 2022
We’re just back from Rome, where the empire is no more but its imprint enthralls. And yes, that’s like the stock market. We’ll get to...
September 28, 2022
Maybe we should have a horse race to decide our elections. In Siena, the whole region gathers July 2 and August 16 annually, thronging the...
September 21, 2022
Are traders shorting your stock? There’s a good article in IR Magazine by independent board director Rosalind Kainyah on what she expects from the company’s...
September 14, 2022
Well, that answers that question. The question? If over 50% of volume in the S&P 500 is short for the first time ever and investment...
September 7, 2022
The marvel is that people keep buying it. Buying what? That the stock market goes up and down for rational reasons. The market plunged in...
August 31, 2022
Bill Miller once said, “Seventy percent of stock-pickers are closet indexers.” The image at right is the composition of the daily average volume in...
August 24, 2022
I get a kick out of Jeff Yass and not just because he’s a libertarian. And when did “libertarian” became a bad word? We used...
August 17, 2022
Never underestimate the big importance of small things. It’s a line from a book called The Midnight Library that we listened to while driving from...
August 10, 2022
What a week back from Switzerland. We lost historian David McCullough and singer Olivia Newton-John. Meme stocks went berserk anew. And speaking of berserk, after...
August 3, 2022
We’re back after a month-long absence! And it’s not the same as it was. That’s a line from Harry Styles’ new hit. Wistful tune. He...
July 20, 2022
It’s good to get yourself a long way away from things. You might find you’ve been missing the forest for the trees. So we’re in...
June 29, 2022
We’re about to decamp for Switzerland for the month of July. It’s an example of time and experience changing what we do. We’re blessed to...
June 22, 2022
Skip meals, give up beer, burn calories. That combination lowers my weight. The essentials. In fact, depending on the amount of meal-skipping and skipping-rope (well,...
June 15, 2022
CNBC is running a second-by-second countdown to the Federal Reserve decision on rates today. Seems like a market too dependent on the few. Risk disperses...
June 8, 2022
The SEC wants to save the little guy. Again. A number of you alert readers sent me this story (WSJ registration required but there are...
June 1, 2022
How do I attract more investors? It’s the key question from investor-relations people, the liaison to Wall Street for public companies. The answer, though, isn’t...
May 25, 2022
SNAP broke yesterday. I’ll explain two reasons why. Yes, the company blew the quarter. Dramatic swings in guidance don’t instill joy. But the losses occurred...
May 18, 2022
The Terra Lunacy (cough cough) is about creating and destroying. If you’re thinking, “Lord, I want to read about cryptocurrencies like I want to use...
May 11, 2022
“The market structure is a disaster.” That’s what Lee Cooperman said in a CNBC conversation yesterday with “Overtime” host Scott Wapner. What he thinks is...
May 4, 2022
You never know where you’ll hear a new vocabulary word. It’s not the word that matters but what it connotes. And the context in which...
April 27, 2022
Did you know the Caribbean is full of brown boobies? The blue-footed brown booby, about the size of a seagull. We’re just back from sailing...
April 13, 2022
Ahoy! As you read, we are stopping in Charlotte en route to a 2pm arrival in Sint Maarten in the Caribbean. We saw the inflation...
April 6, 2022
Cathie Wood says don’t do it. Raise interest rates, that is. The founder of Ark Investment Management and guru to retail traders of Tech stocks...
March 30, 2022
This is weird. I’m traveling to an actual business meeting, by aircraft, and I intend to wear a suit. There are many things in our...
March 23, 2022
What’s 218 pages and heavily footnoted? No, not an Act of Congress. Federal laws are ten times longer or treated as unserious. It’s the new...
March 16, 2022
Shocking. No other word for it. Yesterday as VIX volatility futures settled on an odd Tuesday, Barclays suspended two of the market’s biggest Exchange Traded...
March 9, 2022
Here’s my grand unified theory on the world. We stopped following the rules. Not that humans don’t color outside the lines routinely. But in the...
March 2, 2022
The stock market last week posted its best day since 2020 and gave it back. Why? And why does your stock rise while another falls,...
February 23, 2022
I took a screenshot yesterday at 2:22pm, on Feb 22, 2022. Sign from God? Turning point? Hogwash? Those are better than most proffered reasons for...
February 16, 2022
See this photo? Winter Carnival in Steamboat Springs. The Old West. Sort of. People ride shovels on snow down main street behind horses. Now. What...
February 9, 2022
One hundred seventy-eight companies reported earnings yesterday. Could one predict which would rise or fall? There are 148 on deck today, 149 tomorrow. The high...
February 2, 2022
There are four Pinthouse locations in Austin and Round Rock, TX. We’ve not been to any of them but we’ve had their scrumptious hazy IPA...
January 26, 2022
There’s no excuse. It’s 2022. Not 1934, when Benjamin Graham wrote Security Analysis. Back then, the timeless notion of buying profitable companies with undervalued growth...
January 19, 2022
My advice? When the market gets tough, go sailing. Heck, go sailing when stocks are soaring. I recommend it. If you missed the Market Structure...
December 29, 2021
Here we go again. Twitter fans of Fast Trading are claiming these firms help markets and especially the little guy. Now, before you check out,...
December 22, 2021
Science and the stock market both aim for outcomes data don’t support. I’m going to take you on a short but intense journey, with ground...
December 15, 2021
“Do you see the market as disingenuous?” That’s what the Benzinga host asked me yesterday on a stock-market web program. I generally do two Benzinga...
December 8, 2021
Let’s have a show of hands. How many of you think investors woke up, several pounds heavier, the day after Thanksgiving, and opened a browser...
December 1, 2021
It was Monday, Dec 24, 2018. The Friday before, the S&P 500 had dropped 3%, bringing monthly losses to 13% and putting the market on...
November 24, 2021
The most important thing this week is gratefulness. We at ModernIR wish you and yours everywhere happiness and joy as those of us here in...
November 17, 2021
A lot has happened on Nov 17. Queen Elizabeth took the throne in 1558. Napoleon beat the Austrians outside Venice (and declared Piazza San Marco...
November 10, 2021
The drug wears off. Four-word summary for monetary policy and markets. If you’re thinking, “I can’t take any more market structure or monetary policy!” you’re...
November 3, 2021
One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. So, purportedly, said Plato. That’s...
October 27, 2021
D-whacked. That’s how some described the stock market the past few days. Since Donald Trump has been cancelled from popular culture, you’d be excused for...
October 20, 2021
Gamestop wasn’t our fault. That’s the conclusion of the Securities Exchange Commission in a 45-page report. I’m reminded of Gulliver. Not tiny people with tiny...
October 13, 2021
Winter is coming. But autumn is mighty fine this year in the Rockies, as my weekend photo from Yampa Street in Steamboat Springs shows. Winter...
October 6, 2021
Why do you hold an Analyst Day? Traders and investors, these are what Joel Elconin on Benzinga Premarket Prep this past Monday called “the dog...
September 29, 2021
It’s window-dressing. That saying suggests effort to make something appear better than it is. And it’s a hallmark of stocks in today’s Relative Value era...
September 22, 2021
Bucket-list seeing Colorado aspens in autumn. It will remind you that the planet is a living canvas and that everything is going to be okay....
September 16, 2021
If stocks rise when VIX options expire, is it good or bad? It’s data. That, we know. If you’d never considered a relationship between stocks...
September 8, 2021
Are you Value or Growth? Depends what we mean, I know. S&P Dow Jones says it distinguishes Value with “ratios of book value, earnings and...
September 1, 2021
Suddenly it’s September. Statistically, the worst month for stocks. It’s then no surprise that SEC Chair Gary Gensler would start hucking Molotovs at market structure....
August 25, 2021
Where’s what going? Time? Hm. Money? Well. Yes. It abounds and yet it doesn’t go far. Why that’s the case is another story (I can...
August 18, 2021
Things are getting worrisome. It’s not just our spectacular collapse in Afghanistan less than a month before the 20-year anniversary of Nine Eleven. That’s bad,...
August 11, 2021
The starting point for good decisions is understanding what’s going on. I find it hard to believe you can know what’s going on when you’re...
August 4, 2021
We’re back! We relished upstate New York and Canandaigua Lake. If you’ve never been to Letchworth and Watkins Glen parks, put them on your list....
July 21, 2021
So which is it? Monday, doom loomed over stocks. In Punditry were wringing hands, hushed tones. The virus was back. Growth was slowing. Inflation. The...
July 14, 2021
Happy Bastille Day! Also, Goldman Sachs made $15 per share, 50% over expectations. The stock declined. JP Morgan earned $12 billion on revenue of $31...
July 7, 2021
What should you know about your stock, public companies? Well, what do you know about your business that you can rattle off to some inquiring...
June 30, 2021
The Russell Reconstitution is so big everybody talks about it. And yet it’s not. The Nasdaq touted its role facilitating this year’s Russell reset, saying,...
June 23, 2021
The world relies on one semiconductor company. How did an economic ecosystem let itself get boxed in like that? About the same way it happened...
June 16, 2021
Is Jay Powell the new Investor Relations Officer for all public companies? Before we answer, the tranquil image at right free of the Federal Reserve...
June 9, 2021
Do stores sell coats in the summer? No, they sell bathing suits. They match product to consumer. Do you, investor-relations professionals? I’ll tell you what...
June 2, 2021
Investor relations involves risk. And that’s good. Don’t you mean investing involves risk, Tim? And why is it good? Well, yes, investing is a risky...
May 26, 2021
I don’t think Harvard Business Review understands 21st century investor relations. No offense to the smart folks there. Authors Dennis Carey, Ram Charan and Bill...
May 19, 2021
Leaving South Carolina is hard. It’s captivating. We had not a bad meal from Savannah to Pawleys Beach. Perfect weather (the surprising part). But always...
May 12, 2021
When I was a kid I read Ray Bradbury’s novel, Something Wicked this Way Comes, which plays on our latent fear of caricature. It takes...
May 5, 2021
This Cinco de Mayo we’re grateful for tequila. Especially if you’re a Tech investor. Why are companies crushing earnings and revenue being pulverized by an...
April 28, 2021
It’s earnings season. Across the market, companies beat expectations and lift guidance and stocks decline. Huh? I can offer a broad array of cases. Take...
April 21, 2021
Google chose as motto “don’t be evil.” “Beware derivatives” isn’t a bad motto either. If you’ve read the MSM long, you know we’ve beaten the...
April 14, 2021
In Lake Jackson, TX, you can take This Way or That Way. No, really. I snapped that shot Friday at the corner of This Way...
April 7, 2021
Do you know traders could have made 580% in the S&P 500 the past 200 days? Public companies, your stock need not rise. I’ll...
March 31, 2021
The stuff Archegos used expires today. Sound like Greek? Let me explain. A hedge fund blew up. Its counterparties are taking huge hits. There are...
March 24, 2021
Public companies and investors, is the Federal Reserve using cash to hurt you? What? Quast, don’t you mean they’re inflating stocks? To a point, yes....
March 17, 2021
Couldn’t blame you if you missed it. For many, these past few weeks and the ones coming up are the busiest on the IR...
March 10, 2021
The Securities and Exchange Commission is in danger of becoming the Dept of Silly Walks. Let me explain why I’m calling the SEC Monty Python....
March 3, 2021
If your house was missing a wall, would you worry whether the front door was locked? Well, the stock market is missing a wall. And...
February 24, 2021
I knew it would come to this. Rep. Maxine Waters would be on CNBC talking about market structure. Last week during options expirations, Congress paraded...
February 17, 2021
Good offense beats good defense. These five words are the heartbeat of the Saban Dynasty in football at Alabama – and the reason for the...
February 10, 2021
Editorial Note: A giant thank you to Client Services Director Perry Grueber for penning last week’s Map. He’ll be back regularly, by popular demand. This...
February 3, 2021
“Looking good, Valentine!” “Feeling good, Louis!” A gentleman’s bet. But maybe not so fast. Farce met Street last week with good reason distracting many in...
January 27, 2021
Sailing takes me away to where I’ve always heard it could be just a dream and the wind to carry me. Christopher Cross said it...
January 20, 2021
How durable is the US stock market? It sounds like we’re talking about shoes. Can I wear these hiking? Are they waterproof? No, it’s a...
January 13, 2021
The market is always forward-looking, said the pundit. We were driving back from Steamboat to Denver and listening to satellite radio. It was noon coming...
January 6, 2021
Happy New Year! Last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice. TS Eliot said that. If you need...
December 23, 2020
“We track everything in our facilities, down to the number of gloves we use. Why wouldn’t we track everything in the market? Our primary purpose...
December 16, 2020
The Federal Reserve’s balance sheet is 185 times leveraged, and DoorDash’s market cap is $50 billion. I’m sure it’ll all work out. In some ways...
December 9, 2020
How does the stock market work? That’s what somebody was asking at the online forum for my professional association, NIRI. By the way, the NIRI...
December 2, 2020
Are you 2.0? I know. You’re tired of clichés. Especially in a pandemic that birthed a lexicography – social distancing, mask-up, nonessential, emergency executive orders,...
November 25, 2020
The stock market is high on tryptophan, hitting records. Right ahead of Thanksgiving, 2020 looks to deliver the best November in 30 years. We’re grateful!...
November 18, 2020
The most valuable thing is knowing what’s going on. The country is closing amid Covid cases. Simultaneously, the Shiller PE ratio of earnings in the...
November 11, 2020
If electoral processes lack the drama to satisfy you, check the stock market. Intraday volatility has been averaging 4%. The pandemic has so desensitized us...
November 4, 2020
On Nov 4, 2020, words commonly associated with a 12-step program come to mind. Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom...
October 28, 2020
The data are more placid than the people. When next we write, elections will be over. We may still be waiting for the data but...
October 21, 2020
We rode the Colorado National Monument this week with our good friends from Sun Valley. There’s a lesson in it about life and stocks both....
October 14, 2020
There’s one left. This week brings the last pre-election monthly options-expirations cycle. It’s the final time to take or manage risk with options that expire...
October 7, 2020
You’re wondering what the heck “vahlcue” is. It was up almost 4% in the last hour yesterday as stocks tipped off the diving board. Meanwhile,...
September 30, 2020
You all remember the Fat Finger? It’s a gaffe, trading-style. In one 2014 instance, if the record can be believed, somebody in Japan accidentally tried...
September 23, 2020
What can you control? It’s a question largely abandoned in the modern era under the assumption humans can control everything. Arrogance often precedes experience-induced humility....
September 16, 2020
There’s a beer in this for you. A glass of rosé from Provence if you prefer. What’s the most liquid stock in the US market?...
September 9, 2020
Softbank bet big on call-options and Technology stocks are sinking. So goes the latest big story. Business-reporting wants a whale, a giant trade that went...
September 2, 2020
In Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, a collection of eccentrics finds a flaw in real estate securities and shorts them. The movie is great, the...
August 26, 2020
Is it good to be part of the collective? From Karl Marx to Friedrich Hayek, polemics ring like swords and plowshares on anvils. But that’s...
August 19, 2020
Minis abound. You can trade fractions of shares. Heck, the average trade-size is barely 100 shares, and 50% of trades are less than that. Minis,...
August 12, 2020
The stock market’s glowing core can’t hide the dark edges – rather like this photo I snapped of the Yampa River in downtown Steamboat springs...
August 5, 2020
In the sense that high-speed transmission lines connecting computerized boxes are the stock market, it’s boxes and lines. Also, stock exchange IEX, the investors...
July 29, 2020
The Comanches ruled the Llano Estacado once. We crossed it twice this week, driving in a day to Austin from Denver, and the next day...
July 22, 2020
A year ago, Karen and I were flying to Fiji, 24 hours of travel from Denver to LA, to Auckland, to Nadi. We took...
July 15, 2020
The US stock market trades about $500 billion of stock daily, the great majority of it driven by machines turning it into trading aerosol, a...
July 8, 2020
The price-to-earnings ratio in the S&P 500 is about 23. Is it even meaningful? Some say a zero-interest-rate environment justifies paying more for stocks. That’s...
July 1, 2020
Happy 2nd Half of 2020! I bet we’re all glad we’re halfway there. Karen and I would’ve been in Greece now sailing the Ionian...
June 24, 2020
We’re coming to the end of two Coronavirus quarters. What happens now? In a word, July. As to what July brings, it’s summer in the...
June 17, 2020
The stock market is a story of the seen and the unseen. Ethereal, hieratic, a walk by faith not by sight kind of thing? No,...
June 10, 2020
Is retail money creating a Pandemic Bubble? Sort of. Really, it’s Fast Traders turning those orders into clouds of squid ink. There are 47 million...
June 3, 2020
The question vexing Uber and Grubhub as they wrestle over a merger is which firm’s losses are worth more? And for investors considering opportunities among...
May 27, 2020
Liquidity is driving the stock market. And I don’t mean the Federal Reserve. I saw it firsthand in my Interactive Brokers account. I bought 600...
May 20, 2020
We’ve been pandemicking across the fruited plain and through the stock market for better than two months. Now what? I still rue my decision Friday...
May 13, 2020
In the Colorado mountains at Steamboat Springs, the pixie dust florescence of greening aspen leaves paints spring onto the high country. In the bowels of...
May 6, 2020
A decade ago today, stocks flash-crashed. I’m reminded that there are points of conventional market wisdom needing reconsideration. It’s not because wisdom has diminished. It’s...
April 29, 2020
How much does free money cost? Everything, apparently. The play Hamilton by Lin Manuel Miranda has grossed over $620 million, seventh all-time on Broadway but...
April 22, 2020
Apr 21, yesterday, is Texas A&M Aggie Muster. Aggies everywhere gather to say “here” for Aggies lost in the past year, a roll call. It’s...
April 15, 2020
I rest my case, and it only took 15 years. On Dec 29, 2009, we wrote in this very blog we’d then been clattering off...
April 8, 2020
I know this Friday will be good. I’ll let you think about that one. By the way, markets are closed then. For a decade we’ve...
April 1, 2020
DoubleLine’s famed Jeff Gundlach says we’ll take out March lows in stocks because the market is dysfunctional. Karen and I have money at DoubleLine through...
March 25, 2020
All 20 biggest points-losses for Dow Jones Industrials (DJIA) stocks in history have occurred under Regulation National Market System. And 18 occurred from 2018-2020. Fifteen...
March 18, 2020
In crises I think of Winston Churchill who said, “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it...
March 13, 2020
My email inbox took such a fusillade of stock volatility halts yesterday that I set two rules to sort them automatically. Emails rained in well...
March 11, 2020
We’ve written of risks in stocks from proliferating Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). We’ve talked long about liquidity risks, here last October with CNBC’s Brian Sullivan....
March 4, 2020
I fear the Coronavirus may cause us to miss the real clanging claxon the past two weeks: The stock market cannot handle any form of...
February 26, 2020
I apologize. Correlation between the market’s downward lurch and Karen’s and my return Sunday from the Arctic Circle seems mathematically irrefutable. Shoulda stayed in Helsinki....
February 12, 2020
Does it matter where stock-trades occur, investors and public companies? It does to the stock exchanges. The explosion in passive investing has driven trades toward...
February 5, 2020
You know it’s after Groundhog Day? We passed Feb 2 and I don’t recall hearing the name Punxsutawney Phil (no shadow, so that means a...
January 29, 2020
What did you say yesterday to your executive team, investor-relations officers, if you’d sent a note Monday about mounting Coronavirus fears? The market zoomed back,...
January 22, 2020
Coronaviruses are common throughout the world. So says the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The market didn’t treat news of spreading cases in...
January 15, 2020
Proportional Response is the art of defusing geopolitical conflict. Proportional Response is also efficient effort. With another earnings season underway in the stock market, efficient...
January 8, 2020
Happy New Year! I hope you enjoyed our gift: A two-week break from my bloviating! We’d planned to run best-of columns and thought better, because...
December 18, 2019
Time matters. We’ve gone 42 trading days with the ten-point Market Structure Sentiment index, our proprietary measure of the propensity of algorithms to lift or...
December 11, 2019
I recall reading in high school that the military’s then new jet, the FA-18 Hornet, would fall out of the sky if not for computers....
December 4, 2019
“How do you think about ESG?” said my friend Moriah Shilton at a San Francisco NIRI summit some weeks back with hedge fund Citadel. Silence....
November 26, 2019
As Thanksgiving nears, we’re giving thanks for a rock-star stock market since last December, when it fell 20%. Can it hold? In the simplest sense,...
November 20, 2019
Happy birthday to Karen Quast! My beloved treasure, the delight of my soul, turns an elegant calendar page today. It’s my greatest privilege to share...
November 13, 2019
Public companies, are you still reporting financial results like it’s 1995? Back then, Tim Koogle and team at Yahoo! made it a mission to be...
November 6, 2019
Balloons rise on hot air. Data suggest there’s some in stocks. Lipper says about $25 billion left US equities in October, $15 billion if you...
October 30, 2019
CNBC’s Brian Sullivan invited me to discuss shrinking market liquidity last Friday. Riveting, huh! Well, it is to me! Unraveling the mystery of the market...
October 23, 2019
If you go to the store for a shirt and they don’t have your size, you wait for the supply chain to find it. There...
October 16, 2019
I’ve never bet on sports, but the bulk of wagers is on the spread – whether the outcome will be above or below a range....
October 9, 2019
What do you do in Steamboat Springs when autumn arrives at the Botanic Park? Why, have a Food & Wine Festival of course! Meanwhile the...
October 2, 2019
Markets swoon and again comes a hunt for why, because news offered no warning. The news has bad data, which makes for bad news. ModernIR...
September 25, 2019
Curtains are window-dressing. Curtains loom. But not the way you think. I’ll explain. Before that, here in New York it’s Indian Summer, and Karen snapped...
September 18, 2019
In 1975, there were no electronic exchanges in the United States. Now the average S&P 500 component trades electronically 17,000 times daily in 134-share increments...
September 11, 2019
There’s a story going around about an epochal rotation from momentum (growth) to value in stocks. It may be a hoax. I’ll explain in a...
September 4, 2019
Want a big ranch out west? Apparently you don’t. The Wall Street Journal last month ran a feature (subscription required) on the mushrooming supply of...
August 28, 2019
I don’t think it should be overlooked that “Quants” and “Quasts” differ by only a letter. Scott Patterson’s 2010 book, The Quants, is a great...
August 21, 2019
“It’s going to be an interesting year.” We wrote that phrase in the Jan 2, 2019 edition of the Market Structure Map. (By the way,...
August 14, 2019
Albert Einstein reputedly quipped that compounding was the 8th wonder of the world. What would he think of negative interest rates? The 10-year German government...
August 7, 2019
Bula! That’s Fijian for “greetings!” You say it “boo-lah.” Fiji is among the friendliest places on the planet. Karen and I are just back from...
July 17, 2019
Any of you Denzel Washington fans? He starred in a 2010 movie loosely based on real events called Unstoppable, about a runaway freight train (I...
July 10, 2019
For a taste of July 4 in a mountain town, featuring boy scouts serving pancakes, a camel amongst horses, sand crane dancers, and Clyde the...
July 3, 2019
While France roasts on both the heat of the US women’s soccer strikers and mother nature’s summertime glow, in Steamboat Springs Lake Catamount sits alpine...
June 26, 2019
This is what Steamboat Springs looked like June 21, the first day of summer (yes, that’s a snow plow). Before winter returned, we were hiking...
June 19, 2019
Every investor and public company experiences volatility – the rate of change in prices. So every investor and public company should come to the market...
June 12, 2019
We’re back! At the NIRI Annual Conference last week in Phoenix (where foliage defied fiery environs) we launched an ad campaign for investor-relations professionals that...
May 29, 2019
Numbers matter. But not the ones you think, public companies and investors. For instance, the best sector the past month is Utilities, up 3.5%, inversing...
May 22, 2019
Your stock may collateralize long and short Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) simultaneously. Isn’t that cognitive dissonance – holding opposing views? Jekyll and Hyde? It’s akin to...
May 15, 2019
Question everything. That saying is a famous Euripides attribution, the Athenian playwright of 2500 years ago. The Greeks were good thinkers and their rules of...
May 8, 2019
As the market fell yesterday like a dragon from the sky (Game of Throners, the data are not good on dragon longevity now), 343 companies...
May 1, 2019
Which is the most important trading day of the month? “The one when my company reports results,” you say. Good guess, and you’re usually right....
April 24, 2019
Suppose you were human resources director for a fleet of driverless taxis. As Elon Musk proposes streets full of autonomous autos, the market has become...
April 17, 2019
Blackrock CEO Larry Fink sees risk of a melt-up, not a meltdown for stocks. Speaking of market structure, I’m a vice chair for NIRI’s Annual...
April 10, 2019
JP Morgan’s global head of macro quant and derivatives research (if you have that title, you should be a big deal!), Marko Kolanovic, says the...
April 3, 2019
As the Dow Jones Industrials surged over 300 points on April Fools Day, the behavior driving it was Exchange Traded Funds, not rational thought reacting...
March 27, 2019
In fourteen years, we’ve not missed an Activist. “Chest-thumping, Quast?” you say. No, a market structure lesson, a way for investor-relations professionals to be valuable....
March 20, 2019
Is less more? This is the question anyone looking at the stock market as a barometer for rational thought – from stock-pickers to investor-relations professionals...
March 13, 2019
It’s all about the Benjamins, baby. What I mean is, Forex (FX) is the world’s most active trading market, with some $5 trillion daily in...
March 6, 2019
Did Exchange Traded Funds drive the recent market rollercoaster? The supply of ETF shares moved opposite the market. The S&P 500 fell about 16% in...
February 27, 2019
While Karen and I consumed Arctic Char in Iceland, stock exchanges sued the SEC. Talk about a big fish story. The NYSE, Nasdaq and CBOE,...
February 20, 2019
EDITORIAL NOTE: We returned last night on a 7-hour flight from Iceland, weighed down with breathtaking photography. As with market structure, there’s too much material...
February 13, 2019
As dawn spreads across the fruited plain today, we’re plunging into Iceland’s Blue Lagoon. If we learn market-structure secrets here, we’ll report back next week....
February 6, 2019
The Investment Company Institute (ICI) says US equities saw net outflows of $5.1 billion Jan 2-23, the latest data. Add the week ended Dec 26...
January 30, 2019
Half the volume in the stock market is short – borrowed. Why? It’s the more remarkable because stocks since late December have delivered an epic...
January 23, 2019
We’re told that on Friday Jan 18, the Dow Jones Industrial Average soared on optimism about US-China trade, then abruptly yesterday “global growth fears” sparked...
January 16, 2019
Do we need another stock exchange? I’ve been asked this question repeatedly since Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Charles Schwab, Citadel Securities, E*TRADE, Fidelity Investments,...
January 9, 2019
Paul Rowady writing at Alphacution says 67% of securities in US stock markets are derivatives dependent on an underlying 33%, made up of company stocks....
January 2, 2019
For the Federal Reserve, 2018 was the end of the lane. For us, 2019 is fresh and new, and we’re hitting it running. The market...
December 19, 2018
In the stock market the beatings have been consistent while we all wait for morale to improve. What’s causing it? I’m surprised conservatives haven’t blamed...
December 12, 2018
Surly Furious would be a great name for a rock band. And maybe it describes stocks. It’s for certain the name of a great Minnesota...
December 5, 2018
We take a moment to honor the passing of George Herbert Walker Bush, 41st President of the United States, who earned respect across aisles and...
November 28, 2018
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, keeper of the buck, speaks today. Should we care, investors and investor-relations folks? There’s been less worshipfulness in the Powell...
November 21, 2018
I like Thanksgiving. We may not all always feel grateful for our circumstances, but an attitude of gratefulness is healthy, I’m convinced. So, happy Thanksgiving!...
November 14, 2018
How is it that stocks and oil fall if no one is selling them? There’s an answer. Tim Tebow once famously sent a one-word tweet:...
November 7, 2018
As the colors of political persuasion in the USA ripple today, what matters in the equity market is what the money is doing. We measure...
October 31, 2018
Boo! As the market raged high and low, so did Karen and I this week, from high in the Rockies where we saw John Denver’s...
October 24, 2018
Anybody hear yesterday’s volatility blamed on Counterparty Tuesday? Most pointed to earnings fears for why blue chips fell 500 points before clawing back. Yet last...
October 17, 2018
As stocks fell last week, pundits declared that interest rates and trade fears had shaken confidence. Yesterday as the Dow Jones Industrial Average zoomed 540...
October 10, 2018
From another rumor that game-maker Zynga might have a buyer, to a Trian bid for Papa John’s, to Bill Ackman’s stake in Starbucks, deals and...
October 3, 2018
Why is a paltry dab of trading volume showing up in settlement data? Those of you with furrowed brows wondering what I’m talking about, let...
September 26, 2018
We were in Portugal and our electric toothbrush went haywire. It would randomly turn on in the night, and no amount of pressing the button...
September 19, 2018
Bom Dia! We returned Monday from Portugal after two fantastic weeks roaming and pedaling this land famed for its explorers. We stood at Cape St....
August 29, 2018
“If a stock trades 500,000 shares daily,” said panelist Mark Flannery from hedge fund Point72 last Thursday on my market-structure panel, “and you’ve got 200,000...
August 22, 2018
Today this bull market became the longest in modern history, stretching 3,453 days, nosing out the 3,452 that concluded with the bursting of the dot-com...
August 15, 2018
“Treasury yields rise as Turkey worries fade,” declaimed a headline at Dow Jones Marketwatch yesterday. This one day after the New York Times bleated, “Plunge...
August 8, 2018
There are two pillars to market intelligence: The Rules, and The Money. By market intelligence, I mean information about what’s pricing a stock. So, translating,...
August 1, 2018
We are finally watching Breaking Bad five years after the most successful basic cable series in television history ended. It’s symbolic of the era that...
July 25, 2018
The earnings-versus-expectations construct that fixates Wall Street and business journalism as companies report results fuels bets on which shell hides the pea. In fact, the...
July 18, 2018
We spent last week in Summit County, famous for Breckenridge and Keystone. With windows open and the sun set, the temperature at 9,000 feet drops...
July 11, 2018
This year’s rare midweek July 4 prompted a pause for the Market Structure Map to honor our Republic built on limited government and unbounded individual...
June 27, 2018
What’s actionable? It’s a buzzword of business and the investor-relations profession. And, yes, my title violates a rule of grammar because you can’t tell if...
June 20, 2018
I hope you enjoyed summer vacation from the Market Structure Map! We skipped last week while immersed in NIRI National, the investor-relations profession’s annual bash,...
June 6, 2018
What do these pension funds below have in common? All (over $1.3 trillion of assets), according to Pensions & Investments, periodical for retirement plans, endorse...
May 30, 2018
We’re back! We recommend Barbados but we didn’t see Rihanna. We also endorse floating around the Grenadines on a big catamaran turning brown and losing...
May 23, 2018
EDITORIAL NOTE: We are on a big catamaran with Painkillers in hand watching the sun dissolve into an aqua Grenadine sea. So while we all...
May 16, 2018
Editorial note: We looked at market Sentiment topping into this week’s options expirations cycle and said to ourselves, “Selves, we should be cheeseburgers in paradise...
May 9, 2018
The smash HBO series Westworld is a lot like the stock market: It has the appearance of reality but is populated by machines (which are...
May 2, 2018
FactSet says quarterly earnings are up 23% from a year ago. Why have stocks declined? There’s an inclination to grasp at fundamental explanations. Yet stock...
April 25, 2018
Substitutes were responsible for yesterday’s market selloff. Remember back in school when you had substitute teachers? They were standing in for the real deal, no...
April 18, 2018
You can’t expect the stock market to reflect earnings. I’ll explain. By week’s end, 20% of the S&P 500 will have reported, and earnings are...
April 11, 2018
In 2016 to much fanfare, the SEC and the stock exchanges smashed a bottle of champagne on the looming bow of a tick-size study and...
April 4, 2018
Spotify ditched convention yesterday with its direct listing on the NYSE. It didn’t raise money or ring the opening bell. It gave shareholders a way...
March 28, 2018
Recent market volatility is, we’re told, investors one day saying “let’s sell everything because of tariffs and a trade war” and two days later “let’s...
March 21, 2018
Jakob Dylan (he of Pulitzer lineage) claimed on the Red Letter Days album by the Wallflowers that there are three ways out of every box....
March 14, 2018
Our good friends at Themis Trading wrote last week about a $14 million settlement between the NYSE and the SEC over a series of violations....
March 7, 2018
I can’t find a team (men’s or women’s) headed to March Madness, the annual collegiate sports fete in the USA, wearing green and purple. But...
February 28, 2018
“It’s like the market has become some uncontrollable machine lurching around,” said friend Pat at the NIRI Rocky Mountain chapter meeting last week. I spoke...
February 21, 2018
Who remembers EF Hutton? When EF Hutton talks, people listen. That slogan crafted by Hutton’s William Clayton, who died in 2013, and now-defunct advertising agency...
February 14, 2018
The market’s Valentine’s Day gift is VIX expirations today. It might be no more than a flirtatious glance toward investors but there’s reason for wariness....
February 7, 2018
One definition of “volatile” is “passing off readily in the form of vapor.” Through yesterday, XIV, the exchange-traded security representing a one-day swap from Credit...
January 31, 2018
We interrupt the white-hot arc of the stock market for this public-service announcement: Watch the dollar. While any number of factors might be selected...
January 24, 2018
Arbitrage Mechanism would be a great name for a rock band. Of course, when bands are named for market terms – Call Option, Factor Model,...
January 17, 2018
Here in CO we can count on sun much of the time but we still watch the weather forecast. It would be a real pain...
January 10, 2018
It’s the number one question. Tack “how long” on the front. I’m asked all the time: “Tim, do you think the stock market is sustainable?...
January 3, 2018
The capital markets are riven with acronyms. One of the first you learn in IR (acronym for investor relations) is “GARP.” Growth at a Reasonable...
December 20, 2017
The legal community was euphoric Tuesday on word stock exchanges listing your shares, public companies, aren’t immune from lawsuits claiming rules favor high-speed traders. Bloomberg...
December 13, 2017
In New York City, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas around Rockefeller Center and it feels more like it here than in Denver...
December 6, 2017
A day ski pass to Vail will now set you back $160-$190. It’s rich but I’m glad the SEC isn’t studying skiing access fees. It...
November 29, 2017
In the past week as stocks jetpacked higher, Passive Investment was 36% of trading volume. The data counter a message Passive managers like Blackrock are...
November 22, 2017
About 60% of US trading takes place on stock exchanges, the other 40% in private broker-operated markets. Should you be worried that nearly half of...
November 15, 2017
We’re in New York this week while companies gather in Dallas for the annual NAREIT conference, the association for real estate investment trusts. Real estate...
November 8, 2017
We’re in San Francisco at the NIRI meeting, warming up with winter coming to Denver and as summer carries airily on in stocks. What metrics...
November 1, 2017
Keep it between the lines, advises an old country song from my youth. “Quast,” you say. “If it’s from your youth, drop the modifier ‘old.’...
October 25, 2017
It’s been so easy making money on stocks around the planet that the actual easy money has been forgotten. The European Central Bank Thursday is...
October 18, 2017
A picture is worth a thousand words. See the picture here, sparing you a thousand words (for a larger view click here). It explains our...
October 11, 2017
You’re welcome. Had Karen and I not departed Sep 20 for Bavaria to ride bikes along the Alps, who knows what the market might have...
September 20, 2017
You need examples. I was wishing a longtime friend who turns 50 Sep 20 a happy what they call on Game of Thrones “Name Day,”...
September 13, 2017
Tim, I’m listening,” said this conference attendee, “and I’m wondering if I made the wrong career choice.” He said, “Am I going to be a...
September 6, 2017
The stock market is full of acronyms. Last month, Chicago-based DRW bought Austin’s RGM. It’s a merger of fast giants – or ones who thought...
August 30, 2017
We’ve said many prayers for friends, family and colleagues in Texas and Louisiana and will continue in the wake of Harvey. There’s a lesson from...
August 23, 2017
Volatility plunged yesterday after spiking last week to a 2017 zenith thus far. But what does it mean? “Everybody was buying vol into expirations, Tim,”...
August 16, 2017
What’s the closing auction worth? A member of the investor-relations profession last week posted a story for community discussion on a CBOE BATS proposal to...
August 9, 2017
Seventy-two years ago today, the United States dropped the second atomic weapon in four days, bringing world war in Asia to dramatic conclusion. Current relations...
August 2, 2017
A guy from Cumbria in the UK has built a Twitter Tape Machine. Programmer Adam Vaughan was long intrigued by ticker tape, the stock market...
July 26, 2017
It’s 8am Eastern Time and you’re in a conference room. Earnings season. Executives around the table. The serious ones in suits and ties like usual....
July 19, 2017
How do you set realistic expectations about your shares for management? I’ll give you examples. One of our clients had a cyberattack and disclosed the...
July 12, 2017
Texas is booming. We road-tripped it June 28-July 6, giving y’all a break from market structure. We rolled the I35 corridor from frenzied Frisco north...
June 28, 2017
Here’s a riddle for you: What’s long and short at the same time? Your shares, public companies (investors, the shares of stocks you own too)....
June 21, 2017
The days are getting shorter. We’ve passed the longest one of 2017, Summer Solstice. Imperceptibly now the sun will move off its zenith. Karen and...
June 14, 2017
Florida reminded us of high-speed traders. I’ll explain. An energized audience and the best attendance since 2012 marked NIRI National, the investor-relations annual confab held...
June 7, 2017
EDITORIAL NOTE: Whew! It’s 11pm here in Orlando (this view just off the patio at Highball & Harvest, The Ritz, Grand Lakes), and NIRI National,...
May 31, 2017
We’re back from the Belizean reef, living like pirates among the stars. Refreshing! When your home is this, and your view is that, and sweet...
May 17, 2017
“What’s eye are? I haven’t seen that acronym.” So said a friend unfamiliar with this arcane profession at public companies responsible for Wall Street relationships....
May 10, 2017
I’ve seen at least four Wall Street Journal stories in May alone about a quiescent VIX. The CBOE’s volatility index derived from options pricing on...
May 3, 2017
“Earnings beat expectations but revenues missed.” Variations on this theme pervade the business airwaves here during earnings, currently at fever pitch. Stocks bounce around in...
April 26, 2017
If you’ve never been to Sedona, AZ in April, go but guard yourself because it will lay hold on your spirit and make it captive...
April 19, 2017
Why don’t I trade like my peers? The CEO is sure it’s because investors don’t understand something – how you manage inventory, your internal rate...
April 12, 2017
In Texas everything is bigger including the dry-aged beef ribs at Hubbell & Hudson in the Woodlands and the lazy river at Houston’s Marriott Marquis,...
April 5, 2017
The point isn’t that Blackrock picked robots over humans. The point comes later. If you missed the news, last week the Wall Street Journal’s Sarah...
March 29, 2017
You might think today’s title is about physical fitness. No, ModernIR is an equity data analytics firm, not a personal trainer. I first heard the...
March 22, 2017
Is the era of high-frequency trading over? While you ponder whether “High Speed Risk” might be a good name for your garage rock band, let’s...
March 15, 2017
Everyone complains about the weather but nobody does anything about it. Mark Twain often gets credit for the clever quip but Twain’s friend Charles Dudley...
March 8, 2017
Can’t see nothing in front of me. Can’t see nothing coming up behind. Those of you who know me know I would never write “can’t...
March 1, 2017
When you’re in a store, how often do you ask for help finding a product? Now think about that, investor-relations professionals, and investors. You former...
February 22, 2017
“Since I started Baron Funds in 1982,” said Ron Baron on Squawk Box last week, “we’ve owned 2,500 stocks. Take 15 of them out and...
February 15, 2017
On Friday Feb 10, behavioral-change in the stock market rocked the Richter. Stocks themselves seem rather to be rocking the Casbah, Clash-style (obligatory Grammy Awards...
February 8, 2017
We’re in Steamboat Springs this week watching the moose on the snowbanks and letting the world slow down with them for a bit. It sets...
February 1, 2017
If you want to be creeped out – and who doesn’t? – see the movie “Open Water.” It explains the problem with Board reports in...
January 25, 2017
“Our stock dropped because Citi downgraded us today.” So said the investor-relations chief for a technology firm last week during options-expirations. For thirty years, this...
January 18, 2017
How many of you wear a Fitbit? I remember the last time I saw Jeff Morgan, erstwhile NIRI CEO. I said, “Jeff, you’ve lost weight....
January 11, 2017
Last Sunday treated us to a picture-perfect Santa Monica day. We were there helping investor-relations folks at the NIRI Fundamentals conference understand the stock market....
January 4, 2017
I hit a nerve. What sparked the tempest was my assertion last week that investor-relations professionals can’t be just storytellers when over 80% of trading...
December 28, 2016
“Making investment decisions by looking solely at the fundamentals of individual companies is no longer a viable investment philosophy.” So said Steve Eisman, made famous...
December 21, 2016
The whole market is behaving as though it’s got an Activist shareholder. In a sense it does. More on that in a minute. We track...
December 14, 2016
We’re in New York hoping to run into Janet Yellen because today the Federal Reserve probably raises rates. In December last year the Fed hiked,...
December 7, 2016
I find myself in an uncomfortable position. I’m siding with a high-frequency trader. There’s a key lesson here for investor-relations professionals about how prices are...
November 30, 2016
Are you a Counting Crows fan? Karen and I saw the band years ago at Red Rocks, our fabled foothills venue. Front man Adam Duritz...
November 23, 2016
Editorial Note: Happy Thanksgiving! We hope you reflect gratefully this season, as we will. And speaking of reflecting, you might think with markets hitting new...
November 16, 2016
Karen and I are in Playa del Carmen, having left the US after the Trump election. Just kidding! We’re celebrating…Karen’s 50th birthday first here on...
November 9, 2016
Power changed hands in the USA today. I don’t know in what way yet because I’m writing before election outcomes are known, and about something...
November 2, 2016
The Nasdaq will now run Goldman’s dark pool. Walk up to any random stranger and blurt that phrase and see what happens. Nasdaq? Goldman? Dark...
October 26, 2016
The market appears to have become the Walking Dead. I don’t mean a collection of bodies reduced to bloody pulp by a barbed-wire encased baseball...
October 19, 2016
In the five trading days ended Oct 17, 49.1% of average daily stock volume was short. “Wait, what?” you say. “Half the stock market is...
October 12, 2016
Anybody ever said to you, “Do the math?” Yesterday on CNBC’s Squawk Box legendary hedge-fund manager and founder of Omega Advisors Leon Cooperman said the...
October 5, 2016
In Roman mythology, Janus is the two-faced god of beginnings and endings. In Denver, Janus is the god of investing. In the news, Janus is...
September 28, 2016
Spain rocks. We’re back from pedaling the Pyrenees and cruising the rollers of the Costa Brava on bikes, where the people, the food, the wine,...
September 14, 2016
If you want to know what a business is capable of doing, look at its balance sheet. If you want to know what the Federal...
September 7, 2016
Last week US jobs were weak and the market welcomed the news. We tend to laugh or snort when stocks do the opposite of what...
August 31, 2016
Last week a stock strategist said passive investment is worse than Marxism. That’s a way to get attention at risk of offending Marxists. It did...
August 24, 2016
In Luckenbach, Texas, ain’t nobody feeling no pain. We were just there and I think the reason is the bar out the back of the...
August 17, 2016
What keeps stocks going is low volatility. By seeking only to earn the spread on each transaction and not bet on the direction of markets,...
August 10, 2016
Alert reader Raj Mehan at Steelcase forwarded a piece from the Wall Street Journal about traders now aiming with machines to execute stock-market transactions near...
August 3, 2016
I was high-frequency traded by a travel site. Had that happen? You web-search a place and pricing and there’s no availability for the date you...
July 27, 2016
Is index-investing the death knell for investor relations? According to S&P Dow Jones – which, you REITs, will be breaking out your sector from Financials...
July 20, 2016
The market message appears to be: If you want to know the rest, buy the rights. While rival Nintendo is banking on Pokemon Go, Sony...
July 13, 2016
The biggest risk to an arbitrager is a runaway market. Let me frame that statement with backstory. I consider it our mission to help you...
July 6, 2016
If money leaves, how is it stocks rise? After all, most suppose the market is premised on buying leading to higher prices and selling producing...
June 29, 2016
A line in the 1973 song Lord Mr. Ford goes, “All the cars placed end to end would reach to the moon and back again,...
June 22, 2016
We humans don’t like change. We become accustomed to uncomfortable shoes, kinks in the neck each morning, the monotony of sameness. Were we recorded we’d...
June 15, 2016
How do you know macroeconomists have a sense of humor? They use decimal points. While you ponder, it’s that time again when the Federal Reserve...
June 8, 2016
“We try not to confuse busy with productive.” Thus spake the head of investor-relations for an Israeli tech company years ago, and as we wrap...
June 1, 2016
Yesterday China’s stock-futures market Flash-Crashed 10% and recovered in the same single minute. For those new to market structure, the term “Flash Crash” references a...
May 25, 2016
If I could explain monetary policy using mainly actual English words, would you still rather slit your wrists than read it? Tough one, huh. As...
May 18, 2016
Everybody adapts, including institutional investors like Janus. Rattle off a top-ten list of the best active stock pickers visited by teams of company execs and...
May 11, 2016
“Measure the performance of equity securities in the top 85% by market capitalization of equity securities listed on stock exchanges in the United States.” I...
May 4, 2016
You’ve heard the phrase split-second decision? For high-speed traders that would be akin to the plod of a government bureaucracy or the slow creep of...
April 27, 2016
My friend’s dad joked that kids are the most destructive force in the universe. For stocks, the most powerful (and sometimes destructive) force is the...
April 20, 2016
Imagine you were driving and your throttle stuck. Our market Sentiment gauge, the ModernIR 10-pt Behavioral Index (MIRBI) has manifested like a jammed accelerator, remaining...
April 13, 2016
If someone says he’s going to make water, it means one thing. If he says he’s providing liquidity, it means another. We should clear (and...
April 6, 2016
Have you ever set an important goal? Whatever your objective, you must plan how to arrive at your final destination as though it were a...
March 30, 2016
There’s a mistake in last week’s Market Structure Map. We never made it to Boston! The forecasters missed it and snow walloped us with a...
March 23, 2016
Karen and I are in Boston seeing friends at the NIRI chapter (we sponsor) and our trip today like last week coincides with snow in...
March 16, 2016
Karen and I are in the Windy City visiting the NIRI chapter and escaping gales on the Front Range that were delaying flights to Denver...
March 9, 2016
Outcomes are culminations, not events. Denver bid farewell this week to retiring Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning who for eighteen years accumulated the byproducts of focus,...
March 2, 2016
Follow the money. Or the currency. Yesterday markets soared on queue with a Chinese currency devaluation in the form of lower bank reserve requirements (which...
February 24, 2016
Yesterday on what we call Counterparty Tuesday, stocks plunged. Every month options, futures and swaps expire and these instruments represent trillions of notional-value dollars. Using...
February 17, 2016
Volumes are big but trades are small as markets pitch and buck. On this restless sea, is there a message in a bottle? That would...
February 10, 2016
“Other than that, everything’s okay.” My friend Gary, a smart guy with an MBA from the University of Chicago, uses that line to herald dire...
February 3, 2016
The X-Files are back on TV so the pursuit of paranormal activity can resume. Thank goodness, because the market appears to be paranormal (X-Files theme...
January 27, 2016
The 1,200 NYSE stocks supported by Barclays were the last redoubt of the old market-making guard. Yesterday, New York City-based Global Trading Systems (GTS) said...
January 20, 2016
You’ve heard the saying that’s it all in your perspective. It applies to volatility. Volatility is up 150% since the post-financial-crisis nadir of 10.32 for...
January 13, 2016
There’s no denying the connection between tulips and derivatives in 1636. The Dutch Tulip Mania is often cited as the archetype for asset bubbles and...
January 6, 2016
Happy New Year! There comes a time in life when, to quote a friend most adept at wordsmithing, “One hallmark of a great vacation is...
December 30, 2015
Most of you are out this week, but you’ve got phones. Unless you’re disconnected from them like we were (by choice) a couple weeks back...
December 23, 2015
Editorial Note: Happy Holidays! We’re back from travels but will share our findings in the first Market Structure Map of the new year. Ahead of...
December 16, 2015
EDITORIAL NOTE: We’re getting far away from today’s Federal Reserve decision colliding with options expirations (VIX today, with more expirations tomorrow and Friday), escaping to...
December 9, 2015
Looking around at the market, we decided the only thing to do is go to St. Maarten. Safely at sea, we’ll wait out options-expirations and...
December 2, 2015
I looked back at what we wrote Dec 2, 2008. It was two weeks before Madoff (pronounced “made off” we’d observed bemusedly) became synonymous with...
November 25, 2015
A war of words is unfolding in our profession. In case you’ve not followed, it’s about the market for the product you manage as investor-relations...
November 18, 2015
If the stock market reflects all information currently known, why are buyout deals nearly always done at a premium to market price? “Because, Quast, deals...
November 11, 2015
Algorithmic trading is Wall Street’s last best hope. So said the lead sentence in a story called Algo Wars in the May 30, 2005 edition...
November 4, 2015
Why are stocks rising if earnings and revenues are falling? FactSet’s latest Earnings Insight with 70% of the S&P 500 reporting says earnings are down...
October 28, 2015
I debated high-frequency trader Remco Lenterman on market structure for two hours. Legendary financial writer Kate Welling (longtime Barron’s managing editor) moderated. Your executives should...
October 21, 2015
Earnings season. Late nights for IR professionals crafting corporate messages for press releases and call scripts. Early mornings on CNBC’s Squawk Box, the company CEO...
October 14, 2015
“You’re giving the exchanges so much business, they should be paying you,” said Richard Keary of Global ETF Advisors in a June 2014 Financial Times...
October 7, 2015
In the television and cinematic series Star Trek, the Replicator creates stuff. Captain Jean-Luc Picard would instruct it to dispense “tea. Earl Grey. Hot.” This...
September 30, 2015
Autumn lavished Chicago and Boston in the past week, where we were sponsoring NIRI programs. While nature celebrated the season, stocks did not, continuing a...
September 23, 2015
Why are my shares down when my peers are up? The answer most times isn’t that you’ve done something poorly that your peers are doing...
September 16, 2015
“We’re 90% in natural gas and natural-gas liquids,” said the investor-relations officer for a NYSE-listed master-limited partnership at yesterday’s NIRI luncheon in Houston, where I...
September 9, 2015
Suppose gas prices changed 3% daily. Pretty soon everyone would look for patterns in volatility and start rushing to fill tanks at low ebbs. Or...
September 2, 2015
One thing you learn not to say is “well it can’t go any lower.” So said the investor-relations officer for a big energy company as...
August 26, 2015
“I must say as to what I have seen of Texas it is the garden spot of the world.” Davy Crockett said it and left...
August 19, 2015
Investor-relations professionals are traveling salespeople. Now, we’re not paid commissions and I can see some of you recoiling at the imagery of rumpled suits and...
August 12, 2015
Credit Suisse. Deutsche Bank. ITG. Pipeline. Barclays. UBS. BNP Paribas. Citadel. Goldman Sachs. Liquidnet. Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Citigroup. What commonality unites these firms?...
August 5, 2015
We thought we were going to need a boat. Driving into Kansas City, a torrent fell in such proportion that the sky, the landscape, the...
July 29, 2015
Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons. So wrote Woody Allen for himself as Broadway Danny Rose in the eponymous 1984 film....
July 22, 2015
I recall knowing one particularly volatile fellow. I should have called him VIX. Speaking of the VIX, options on that popularly titled Fear Gauge expire...
July 15, 2015
You need to defend yourselves as public companies. This clarion lesson comes from last week’s trading halt at the NYSE though we think the exchange...
July 8, 2015
Picture a mountain river still crisp with snowmelt babbling happily. Now imagine a town on its banks. Suppose thousands of people jammed the waters congenially...
July 1, 2015
The problem with kicking the can down the road is what happens when you reach a hill. Speaking of hills, Taos wasn’t what we’d expected....
June 24, 2015
What moves you? I gave it thought during ModernIR’s tenth NIRI National (I think 18 of them total for me now) at the Hyatt Regency...
June 17, 2015
As the US investor-relations profession’s annual confabulation concludes in the Windy City, we wonder how the week will end. The problem is risk. Or rather,...
June 10, 2015
The equity market is like Mark Twain said. The trouble ain’t what people don’t know, it’s what they know that ain’t so. Thus did Sam...
June 3, 2015
The midday equity-market silence is deafening. Writing for the Wall Street Journal last week, Dan Strumpf roiled capital-markets constituents describing how stock-trading is now focused...
May 27, 2015
Memorial Day is a time for reflection. We marked it by viewing American Sniper, introspective cinema on prolonged war. There comes a point along that...
May 20, 2015
Investor-relations is an itinerant profession. We’re on the road a lot. If you’ve had one of those three-hour flights, say from Denver to Atlanta, in...
May 13, 2015
“Management wants answers when we don’t trade with our peers.” This is a lyric from a song by the rock band Smart Beta. Just kidding....
May 6, 2015
Whether public companies are winning in the stock market comes down to basis points. The Buttonwood Agreement formulating the US public equity market in 1792...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
March 18, 2015
Some energy-sector clients lost 40% of market-capitalization in three days last October. A year and a half cultivating share-appreciation and by Wednesday it’s gone. How...
March 11, 2015
Why do you need an exchange? Between the Tiber River and the Piazza del Quirinale in Rome sit the remains of Trajan’s Market, built around...
March 4, 2015
Those of you in Boston, we visited accidentally this week. Flying into LaGuardia Sunday afternoon, Mother Nature had thrown up a snowy blockade, and running...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
January 14, 2015
Terra firma. In Latin, “solid earth.” Two thousand years ago people thought Latin would be the lasting language of commerce. History disproved that thesis, but...
January 7, 2015
Happy New Year! We trust you enjoyed last week’s respite from the Market Structure Map. Now, back to reality! CNBC is leaving Nielsen for somebody...
December 24, 2014
As Christmas Eve arrives in the US, market-structure circles are abuzz on tidings from Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), parent of the NYSE, about bold market reform....
December 17, 2014
Volatility derivatives expire today as the Federal Reserve gives monetary guidance. How would you like to be in those shoes? Oh but if you’ve chosen...
December 10, 2014
Suppose you were an elevator operator. In 2013, the conservative Weekly Standard reported that the most senior member of the Senatorial coterie of button-pushers on...
December 3, 2014
Euclid could have been a hedge-fund manager. The Greek mathematician and father of differential geometry defined our understanding of three-dimensional shapes in roughly 280 BC....
November 26, 2014
Happy Thanksgiving from Austin, TX! Many of you are out too, seeing family for the holiday. Looking back at 2014, this Market Structure Map from...
November 19, 2014
You’ve got to know what to measure. Every time I interact with anybody from an airline to my company’s communications providers, I get a survey....
November 12, 2014
Ticks are blood-sucking insects, about how regulators have viewed spreads between stock prices. Country singer Brad Paisley sings that he’d like to walk you through...
November 5, 2014
What are the implications? Posing that question is a great conversation-starter unless you’ve just asked your teenage son about a substance you’ve found in his...
October 29, 2014
“I’m going to write a four-letter word meaning intercourse,” my speech-class colleague Jim announced, striding to the chalk board. It was 1986. Stunned, the rest...
October 22, 2014
It’s not what you think. Heard that phrase before? Last Wednesday, Oct 15, apparently everybody trading equities believed the world was dissolving in an apocalyptic...
October 15, 2014
There’s no one-word description. The Ides of October arrives serene and tranquil in Denver, the Rockies dusted with recent snow, the sky intensely blue, deciduous...
October 8, 2014
I remember the day my elementary school friend pierced his ear. By accident. We were nine-year-olds fishing eastern Oregon’s Burnt River on my dad’s cattle...
October 1, 2014
Autumn the past two weeks splashed brilliantly over the Colorado Front Range. It puts everything into perspective. I recall as a kid my mother saying...
September 24, 2014
Humans are often entertained by illustrations of absurdity through reality. For instance, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew months ago said he’d like to address tax inversions...
September 17, 2014
We figured if The President goes there it must be nice. Reality often dashes great expectations but not so with Martha’s Vineyard where we marked...
September 10, 2014
Amazed. Dazed. Perhaps needing a drink. Thus shown the faces of investor-relations practitioners at yesterday’s NIRI Southwest Regional Conference as Rajeev Ranjan from the Chicago...
September 3, 2014
Facebook collaborated with two respected universities to study your emotional responses when shown different kinds of news. Without your knowledge. We learned in June, you...
August 27, 2014
Let’s talk about houses. Let me explain. Twice yesterday I encountered an issue, not a new one though. We were discussing it on a conference...
August 20, 2014
We’ll be listening in the car to a song on satellite radio’s The Pulse, trying to keep current, and I’ll say to Karen, “Do you...
August 13, 2014
Know the song by OMC? Jumped into the Chevy. Headed for big lights. Wanna know the rest? Hey, buy the rights. How bizarre, how bizarre…...
August 6, 2014
Some would argue I should’ve hit him. Only kidding! But let me tell you a story. I was driving yesterday and saw approaching from the...
July 30, 2014
I’ve made South Dakota jokes – “fly-over state,” “waste of dirt that could have been used making Colorado larger,” etc. Not again. It’s but six...
July 23, 2014
What if exchanges stopped paying fast traders to set prices? Oh, you didn’t know? Read on. Off Salt Island in the British Virgins is the...
July 16, 2014
Movie tip: Karen and I took our visiting teenaged nephew to see Edge of Tomorrow, starring Tom Cruise. Hysterically entertaining. Appropriate for teens (scary monsters...
July 9, 2014
There’s the old joke about camels. They’re horses designed by a committee. Speaking of committees, for the second time in a month, that august federal...
July 2, 2014
Do you remember that movie, The Island? The people who every day hope they’re selected to go to a tropical paradise are unwitting machinery for...
June 25, 2014
On a hot Sunday 138 years ago today, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer rode into the valley Native Americans called the Greasy Grass. The rest...
June 18, 2014
If you’re in a tree sawing off a branch, note which side of it you’re standing on. The guy studying the branch was Brad Katsuyama,...
June 11, 2014
With crowning dreams of California Chrome and the unfortunately tinny conclusion to the equine trifecta dominating news, you might have missed what counted last week....
June 4, 2014
We marked May’s end aboard a boat on the trade winds from Norman to Anegada in the archipelago of the British Virgin Islands. It’s an...
May 28, 2014
EDITORIAL NOTE: We’re right now plying the azure waters off Richard Branson’s Necker Island. The following edition of the Market Structure Map ran May 29,...
May 21, 2014
It’s time we had The Talk. Candid discussions can be uncomfortable. They broach subjects we prefer to avoid. But we can’t ignore the facts of...
May 14, 2014
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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 &...
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...
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....
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...
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...
February 19, 2014
Are you a commuter? Even if not, come along for today’s ride or you’ll miss the story. Imagine that you drove to work by car....
February 12, 2014
February 5, 2014
Mayday! That’s the word quarterback Peyton Manning should’ve used Sunday, instead of Omaha! But we congratulate Coach Pete Carroll, a gentleman, and his bruisers from...
January 29, 2014
Omaha! Rather than Nebraska, we’re in Steamboat Springs enjoying spectacular slopes before this weekend’s big game between our Broncos and the Seahawks. Denver quarterback Peyton...
January 22, 2014
Did you know that auctioneers make bad grocery-store clerks? So argues a GEICO TV commercial – unwittingly teaching a last lesson on high-frequency trading. I’m...
January 15, 2014
A good exit strategy. It’s always wise to have one. With the polar vortex bearing down on the national midsection last week, our exit strategy,...
January 8, 2014
Happy New Year! Hope you spent the two-week break from these pages joyfully. We’ve descended this week from the high Denver backbone of the continent...
December 18, 2013
Is the Federal Reserve fueling stock-market gains? When St. Louis Fed president James Bullard addressed the Bowling Green, KY, Chamber of Commerce in February 2011,...
December 11, 2013
Do retail investors matter? Depends what you mean. They’re important and valuable as investors. I once headed investor relations for a company with thousands of...
December 4, 2013
I’m reminded of a joke (groans). A man is sent to prison. As he settles into his captive routine he’s struck by a midafternoon affair...
November 27, 2013
Happy Thanksgiving! Here’s a phrase Karen’s grandmother coined that you may find useful this time of year: “We ate to dullness.” Since many of you...
November 20, 2013
In the timeless 1987 movie The Princess Bride, Vizzini the Sicilian, played riotously with a lisp by Wallace Shawn, keeps declaring things “inconceivable!” Swordsman Inigo...
November 13, 2013
Today a new era begins. One day in May 1792, 24 brokers gathered beneath a buttonwood tree in lower New York City and agreed to...
November 6, 2013
We were in Kansas again. We set a personal record, visiting the state twice last week. Even Wichita is nice this time of year, as...
October 30, 2013
We were in King Soopers and they were out of lemons. For those of you elsewhere in the country and world, King Soopers is a...
October 23, 2013
Everybody is talking about the weather. Why doesn’t somebody do something? This witticism on human futility is often attributed to Mark Twain but traces to...
October 16, 2013
They keep you from getting lost in irrelevant sideshows. That’s how University of Chicago economics professor John Cochrane described the benefits of asset-price models in...
October 9, 2013
We saw Gravity last weekend and like so many others I immediately thought of the equity market. Karen hates how movie trailers today tell the...
October 2, 2013
“When I talk about this stuff with clients, they’re only half-listening until this phrase appears.” Thus spake my learned friend Jim MacGregor, at Abernathy MacGregor...
September 25, 2013
You can see what investors are doing. When indexes are rebalancing, NASCAR ensues. No, not a bunch of noise and southern accents. A race. On...
September 18, 2013
The word of the week was “flood.” Here in Colorado, Denver had a coup d’état by weather patterns from Portland, Oregon for a week but...
September 11, 2013
We smell autumn on the wind in Denver. Soon the backbone of the continent will transform from verdant to orange and yellow and caramel as...
September 4, 2013
“My CEO doesn’t get market structure.” I’ve heard that more than a time or two! IROs wanting executives to grasp market complexity in order to...
August 28, 2013
“All this is not a product of nature.” No I’m not referring to the display, as it were, by Miley Cyrus at the Video Music...
August 21, 2013
“We’ve got 25 analysts. What new thing can we say to change investors’ minds?” So lamented the IRO of a large household name this week....
August 14, 2013
“What do you see out there?” Out here in Crested Butte, CO, where the overnight temperature was 35 degrees, we see vast beauty, perhaps unparalleled...
August 7, 2013
In France we saw Auguste Rodin’s famous sculpture, The Thinker. You know the one? A chiseled fellow (literally and figuratively) pondering in the nude. It’s...
July 31, 2013
Where have I been? Somehow, I missed the fun happening in SEC filings for large banks like Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Credit Suisse...
July 24, 2013
Have you seen those Pure Michigan ads? Compelling. Summer in Colorado could be a brand too, as these views of Hanging Lake near Glenwood Springs...
July 17, 2013
There’s apparently a reality TV show called “Dating in the Dark.” It must lack the cachet of Survivor or The Bachelor because you don’t hear...
July 10, 2013
If stocks trade on moving averages, why do high-frequency firms hire math whizzes? Providing some form of answer, Thomson Reuters will cease publishing the University...
July 3, 2013
Bonjour! Ca va? We’re back from touring Provence aboard cycling saddles, weighing heavier on the pedals after warmly embracing regional food and drink. Lavender air,...
June 19, 2013
We’re in Paris. After last week’s pelting Hollywood, FL schedule at NIRI National 2013, we’re sight-seeing along the Seine and then wheels-down southward through Provence...
June 12, 2013
EDITORIAL NOTE: This edition of the Market Structure Map ran nearly a year ago, on May 30, 2012, right ahead of the NIRI National Conference,...
June 5, 2013
Dollar General (NYSE:DG) dropped 9% yesterday, offering a lesson to investor-relations professionals. Before that, a plug: At NIRI National next week I’m paneling with the...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
April 17, 2013
You’ve heard that bit of cowboy wisdom on how to double your money? Fold it over and put it back in your pocket. I hear...
April 10, 2013
Palo Alto is a great town. While there sponsoring IR Magazine’s West Coast Think Tank last week we feasted at Evvia and Fuki Sushi. Denver’s...
April 3, 2013
Do sharks belong in the ocean? You might reply, “They certainly don’t belong on land.” But that’s not what I mean. This isn’t a lesson...
March 27, 2013
I dare you. Ever say that as a kid? “I’ll give you a dollar if you—” (fill in the blank) Last week the SEC approved...
March 20, 2013
“I get out and meet investors. Tell the story. The rest is noise.” That’s what an IRO I’ve known since the 1990s said last week...
March 13, 2013
Like a billboard reading, “Illiterate? Write for free help,” record demand for VIX futures in a market nearly devoid of volatility seems at best paradoxical...
March 6, 2013
Question: “Would you like more timely information about who owns your shares?” Answer: Yes! Question: “Would you be willing to ask for more timely information?”...
February 27, 2013
I got a kick out of that movie, Night at the Museum. Yes, it’s old, and no, we haven’t seen any of the movies that...
February 20, 2013
Is it diluted? That’s what everybody wants to know about the market. Are gains for broad equity measures, seemingly epic like my skiing Saturday at...
February 13, 2013
Ever set an unrealistic goal? There’s the joke about the Bedouin wandering the desert lost and parched who finds a genie. She grants three wishes....
February 6, 2013
What if? Those two words branded with a question mark may rank 2nd all-time behind “what is the meaning of life?” What if…public companies could...
January 30, 2013
You can wet a finger and run it on the rim of a glass, producing a hum. Sustained, that frequency can shatter glass. Do high-speed...
January 23, 2013
Don’t forget to write your letters, folks! Which letters? See last week’s Market Structure Map on prompting the NYSE or the NASDAQ to file a...
January 16, 2013
“Nobody seems to care about the issuers.” That short sentence in an email from an investor-relations officer recently reflects what many in our profession feel...
January 9, 2013
What surprised me most was how twice as many people knew “high-frequency trading” compared to “dark pools.” The Nasdaq’s Mike Sokoll, Liquidnet’s Nicole Olson and...
January 2, 2013
Happy New Year! Boy, where to begin. With the Fiscal Cliff arrayed theatrically as the curtain rises on 2013, it’s a crapshoot picking what to...
December 19, 2012
No, our title does not refer to Surveillance. Despite the Thomson/Nasdaq deal last week. Yesterday mavens of equity markets converged on Capitol Hill to debate...
December 12, 2012
Why don’t trading and ownership match? Sometimes you must change your point of view – put on the Magic Market Structure Spectacles – to see...
December 5, 2012
CNBC has a Fiscal Cliff countdown clock. You can’t click a TV remote or a web page without somebody declaring that Congress’s inability to compromise...
November 28, 2012
It’s good to know what’s around you. En route back from Austin to Denver we traversed the hinterlands including eight miles of dirt track to...
November 21, 2012
We’re in Texas for Thanksgiving and it was 85 degrees yesterday as we idled in heavy I-35 traffic halfway to Fort Worth. I have to...
November 14, 2012
“Why is our stock underperforming the peer group?” Ever got that question from your CFO or CEO? We hear it too. Speaking of questions, if...
November 8, 2012
Will markets collapse? We’re a day late this week, steering clear of election bipolarity marked by the vicissitudes of demography and the barest palimpsest of...
October 31, 2012
Boo! What a Halloween week. To our many friends, clients and colleagues on the Atlantic seaboard assailed by Hurricane Sandy, we in Denver are rushing...
October 24, 2012
How do you prove relativity? When Einstein proffered the preposterous suggestion that all motion is relative including time, people clearly had not yet seen Usain...
October 17, 2012
Let’s go to the tape. That’s what we hear in sports now, especially football. Send it to the replay booth. Forget the referee’s call. We’ll...
October 10, 2012
Have you seen that car commercial with the bearded guy? The car chimes when you should check the tires. To drive the point home, as...
October 3, 2012
The Great Debate is upon us. No, not the presidential one tonight. The other one, about equity markets. The SEC’s technology summit yesterday aimed at...
September 26, 2012
The structure of equity markets is like Lance Armstrong: Defining an industry but dogged by accusations. The SEC seems to be in near-continuous investigative mode....
September 19, 2012
An ode to erudition in professional sports, these pearls of wisdom overheard on sidelines come thanks to ESPN’s halftime report during the unfortunate demise of...
September 12, 2012
We all love soaring markets. When were you last dead sure what drove your stock up? Today, a German court will decide if German taxpayers...
September 5, 2012
Volcker would be a great name for a shred-metal band. It seems vaguely gothic and you can picture musicians in leather with guitars and tattoos....
August 29, 2012
Define irony. Alanis Morrissette called things ironic in song and was criticized for the apparent absence of irony in her verse. So is it ironic,...
August 22, 2012
The equity market is like Bourbon Street. No, we don’t mean the stock market is home to “Big Daddy’s World Famous Love Acts.” We mean...
August 15, 2012
If our stock reverts to the mean, I don’t see that high-frequency trading matters. I’m paraphrasing what many CEOs and CFOs believe. The market is...
August 8, 2012
Some were forced to do it themselves. In the wake of Knight Capital’s technology glitch – if you missed it, a linchpin in trading markets...
August 1, 2012
Do you hate day traders? Reading the 30-page Waiver and Consent letter from Peter Beck, who once ran now-defunct day-trading firm Swift Trade, it seems...
July 25, 2012
“What happened to our stock?” It remains the question that haunts the dreams of IR professionals. Well, that and whether it’s better to use “via”...
July 18, 2012
For what struck me as a giant one-day life metaphor, I joined 2,500 other clinically insane individuals Sunday on Colorado’s hallowed cycling Triple Bypass (motto:...
July 11, 2012
The recent SEC approval of plans by the NYSE to attract retail dark liquidity generated a nationwide acronym alert. Just kidding. Mostly. But acronyms in...
July 5, 2012
We’re a day late this week in deference to an important birthday yesterday. After 236 years, there are lines and age spots but the countenance...
June 27, 2012
Here’s a riddle: Name a four-letter word that describes why currencies fluctuate and why money in equities modulates around options expirations and the ends of...
June 20, 2012
Thrilling. Arduous. Rewarding. Draining. Spectacular. No, not the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee meeting concluding today with a soliloquy before public microphones from the chairman....
June 13, 2012
Our good friends Joe Saluzzi and Sal Arnuk, proprietors of Themis Trading and experts on market structure, have at last written a book about markets....
June 7, 2012
If you like your NIRI National Conference crisp, Seattle delivers. Gray days in the 50s gave those from the south a welcome break from drenching...
May 30, 2012
“So we should target value investors next week.” Those eight words say much about IR today. I heard them on a weekly web meeting with...
May 23, 2012
What’s green and brown, and rolls? The terrain south of Santa Fe where we rode 103 miles on bikes Sunday, averaging 15.6 mph through 4,500...
May 16, 2012
Karen and I will join the ghost of Billy the Kid and about 3,000 cyclists in New Mexico next weekend for the Santa Fe Century....
May 9, 2012
Congratulations, IR profession! It’s happened. One of our ranks stepped up to the stock-exchange rule-filing plate, planted, and cracked that fastball out of the park....
May 2, 2012
The One Percent is a catchy phrase. But statistics highlight the 11.1%. It’s earnings season. Fifty-seven percent of our clients have reported, our data show....
April 25, 2012
There are old guys around a table watching video. No. They’re not IR professionals. But stay with me for two minutes. One says, “He’s got...
April 18, 2012
If somebody tells you he has a plan to improve your financial condition by borrowing your credit card and buying himself a bunch of stuff...
April 10, 2012
There’s an old stock market joke. Every time one person sells, another buys, and they both think they’re smart. Value is relative. And yet. Anybody...
April 4, 2012
It was 85 degrees Sunday in Denver when Karen and I rode up local landmark Lookout Mountain on bikes to pay respects at Buffalo Bill’s...
March 28, 2012
Suppose the chairperson of the national central bank strode from the organization’s Gothic façade on Maiden Lane and said, “Job growth is likely temporary, and...
March 21, 2012
We’re in glorious Cincinnati where the land is rushing headlong into spring. Even a photo snapped in haste northward at night from Covington at the...
March 14, 2012
We are writing an algorithm that will identify when the performance of your shares is “sexy.” Just kidding. Mostly. It’s no joke, however, that trading...
March 7, 2012
We write this week from sun-splashed Steamboat Springs, where visitors to the slopes are relishing more than seven feet of new snow in the past...
February 28, 2012
Mark Twain said, “Get your facts first and then you can distort them as much as you please.” The 1959 annual review of Mark Twain’s...
February 22, 2012
When you were a kid, did you lie on your back on the lawn and look for shapes in the clouds? Nanex finds Charlie Brown...
February 15, 2012
At Winter Park Sunday scooting off the Panoramic high-speed chair at 12,060 feet and cooking downslope on skis, the trip was anything but algorithmic. No,...
February 8, 2012
We missed part of the Super Bowl tromping snowshod through a chamber-of-commerce snapshot 3,000 feet above Denver. We’ve tallied 20 inches of grade-A, premium Rockies...
February 1, 2012
While Florida voted, Morgan Stanley won the Facebook primary. A unit of Thomson Reuters broke word that the big bank will helm a team of...
January 25, 2012
Good to see you folks in Boston last week. But I needed Denver to thaw me out. It was seventy here last Saturday. I washed...
January 17, 2012
Despite Denver’s rude throttling by the New England Patriots, I am still bound for Boston to panel at the Wednesday NIRI chapter meeting called “A...
January 10, 2012
At county fairs when I was a kid you could buy a “Shoshoni Weather Gauge,” which hawkers said could forecast the weather like an American...
January 4, 2012
Happy New Year! If the holidays this year seemed sweeter, the air more welcome to the well-caroled note, it’s probably because I’ve been quiet for...
December 13, 2011
Editorial Note: This Market Structure Map first ran June 29, 2010. It’s reprinting because Tim Quast is following the lead of congresspersons by taking a...
December 9, 2011
Say you were playing poker. I don’t mean gambling, but real cards. You’re engaged with some seriousness. You’re watching how you bet and when, reading...
November 29, 2011
Belated Happy Thanksgiving! After breaking for a week as an act of giving thanks, we’re back. Karen and I joined 88,622 others in Aggieland at...
November 16, 2011
Apparently, exchanges are not bastions of deep liquidity. In a bombshell dropped at a congressional hearing yesterday, top executives for the NYSE and the...
November 9, 2011
There’s a saying: It’s easier to keep the cat in the bag than to get it back in there once you’ve let it out. Nobody...
November 1, 2011
Having never gone to a Neighborhood Pumpkin-Carving, we were wistful when squirrels promptly devoured the face off our finished product (marked “easiest” in the booklet...
October 26, 2011
Observe. Orient. Decide. Act. OODA. This is how Pipeline Trading describes its predictive analytics for helping buyside customers identify large-block trading opportunities. For those of...
October 19, 2011
Did you see the Nicole Kidman film ten years ago called The Others? A woman becomes convinced her house is haunted. In case you’ve not...
October 12, 2011
I read this at an Occupy Wall Street site: “Let me tell you a wonderful old joke from communist times. A guy was sent from...
October 4, 2011
In politics, Bill Clinton perfected the “trial balloon.” You float an idea of one shade because you’re planning on getting people to embrace an idea...
September 27, 2011
Isaac Newton posited 334 years ago in his third law of motion that mutual forces of action and reaction between two bodies are equal. I...
September 20, 2011
If you absolutely must have trading data fast, who’s your huckleberry? Burstream, apparently. The firm claims it can serve up actionable, meaningful trading data, no...
September 13, 2011
We were sitting on the porch in the shadow of the American flag Sunday September 11 when fighter jets streaked and thundered so low that...
September 6, 2011
When investors buy and sell shares, what happens? The logical answer is “stocks go up and down.” Let’s get more specific. Among the 20 largest...
August 30, 2011
While Irene splashed Wall Street, we Coloradans reveled in the ridden glory of the USA Pro Cycling Challenge. The 500-mile route hosted 130 of the...
August 24, 2011
Show of hands, please. How many of you saw Levi Leipheimer’s monster run in the big ring up the finishing hill at Crested Butte yesterday...
August 16, 2011
Whew, we’re back to good. That seems the attitude about market gyrations in August. Prices recovered. Heck, we should’ve skipped the mess and stayed on...
August 9, 2011
Headline at 2:34 p.m. Eastern Time today: “Fed Pledges Low Rates Through 2013.” How many recognize this as a currency-devaluation? Markets jumped 4% here in...
August 2, 2011
Why are markets dropping like the thermometer at 8pm on Pike’s Peak? Debt chaos, sour economic data, sure. We’re not market prognosticators, we track behavioral...
July 26, 2011
We were in San Francisco Sunday escaping the heat parching most of the country. Cool heads are better than hot heads, we thought. It was...
July 19, 2011
Would you rather ride your road bike in the sun or the rain? What if riding in the sun means peddling across Death Valley in...
July 12, 2011
Your shares compete for attention with a dizzying array of choices in securities markets. Money chases what the market gives today. VZZB is the sort...
July 6, 2011
We’re late this week due to celebrations around the anniversary of the rebellion from the Crown. We played croquet, appropriately and cheekily British we thought...
June 28, 2011
Stocks go up and down. Nothing new there. The dollar dropped for a second straight day today. Stocks are again up, like they were yesterday....
June 21, 2011
We’re back from NIRI National! Orlando sweltered like you’d expect a swamp in central Florida in June might. We heard 1,300 were on hand, up...
June 7, 2011
Coming to NIRI National 2011 next week? Please visit us at Booth 304! We have no helicopter rides or trips to the Bahamas to give,...
June 1, 2011
It’s a question that burns in the minds of IROs daily. No, not that one. This one: “Will an ISO post to the Nasdaq if...
May 24, 2011
Want to know about dark pools? Join the NIRI Virtual Chapter at noon eastern time Wednesday May 25. I’m moderating the discussion. The all-star panel...
May 17, 2011
NBBO would be a good name for a rock band. But it stands for “National Best Bid or Offer.” It also appears to be some...
May 10, 2011
Maybe we should leave more often. Out just one week, and both silver and Osama Bin Laden’s house go on the auction block. Sunday night...
April 26, 2011
I am the doofus on camera that I feared I was. Fortunately, Lou Cordone, head of Thomson Advisory Services is not a doofus, so we...
April 19, 2011
You’ve asked about the Issuer Data Initiative – this effort with you to roll back the dark cloud of mystery that has fallen upon the...
April 14, 2011
Sorry to keep you waiting this week! When the amount I’ve got to do confronts the limited intellectual capacity I’ve got, what happens is stuff...
April 5, 2011
What if some mathematical calculations in the market are just there to get a reaction? Traders have not to my knowledge named them “Charlie Sheen.”...
March 29, 2011
Karen and I are getting in boat shape ahead of a trip to Antigua (Motto: “Don’t ever say the name ‘Allen Stanford’ around here”). But...
March 22, 2011
Would you shrink your share base by 90%? What if it cleared noise out of your trading? NOTE: See the update on the Issuer Data...
March 15, 2011
The Ides of March today carries an air of foreboding that dates to Julius Caesar’s demise in 44 BC. Before Brutus colored the day red,...
March 8, 2011
Don’t pass Go. I will give $200 to the first person who correctly answers two questions. Only corporate IROs may answer. Apologies to the rest,...
March 1, 2011
“We determined that it was appropriate to re-examine the appropriateness of short sale price test restrictions.” We copied that sentence from the SEC’s 334-page charter...
February 22, 2011
Among the eight panelists pondering how to forestall another Flash Crash, my favorite quote comes from Columbia professor and Nobel winner in Economic Sciences Joseph...
February 15, 2011
You might think “OTC” stands for “off the charts,” which is how we’d rate both the skiing in Winter Park last week and the 70-degree...
February 8, 2011
We’re leaving most of this week’s email to our friend Joe Saluzzi at Themis Trading. Joe is a groundbreaking and thoughtful critic of contemporary trading,...
February 1, 2011
Memo on a 70-point swing: Saturday we hiked the red rocks at the Denver Front Range’s Roxborough Park. It was 62 degrees Fahrenheit. This morning...
January 25, 2011
We have good news and bad news. The good news is that investors have put more funds to work in equities during January. We track...
January 18, 2011
Karen and I caught the PBR rodeo at Denver’s National Western Stock Show. I grew up on a ranch and Karen likes four-footed creatures. So...
January 11, 2011
My flight today to Cincinnati through Atlanta froze in the blizzard of lost travel dreams. Which proved fortuitous, as I was able to skip Atlanta...
January 5, 2011
Happy New Year! Good to be back after a two-week break from The Map. Karen and I spent Christmas in Texas, where there remains a...
December 14, 2010
Last week in Miami, I took part in a panel discussion about modern trading realities. The weather Thursday was like it is in Denver now,...
December 7, 2010
Scheduling note: I’m in Miami Friday for a panel discussion on trading realities for the NIRI Senior Roundtable. Hope to see you there! Today is...
December 1, 2010
A note on trading today: The dollar dropped out of the gate this morning, buoying stocks. Talk about soft dollars. The price of shares is...
November 24, 2010
Here in Spokane, the landscape is bleak and wintry, the temperature hovering at ten above. Crisp! Before we gather round our well-laid tables (in America...
November 16, 2010
Blaise Pascal, the 17th century French brainiac, is reputed once to have said in a post script: “I’d have written a shorter letter, but I...
November 9, 2010
Should we ban nakedness? The SEC thinks so. Continuing a raft of rules in response to the Flash Crash, the commissioners voted last week to...
November 2, 2010
We can’t compete with beat-by-beat election updates, so we’ll keep it short and sweet. Speaking of sweet, we came back last night from six days...
October 26, 2010
If you want a belly laugh and a breath of fresh air, read John Cochrane’s oped on the treasury secretary in today’s Wall Street Journal....
October 19, 2010
In Denver, summer’s retreat this year toward the Continental Divide has been languid, its ambling trail marked by fiery aspens and long warm days. But...
October 13, 2010
Boy, when it rains, it pours. Three years ago when we began grousing about how Reg NMS was turning equity trading into a foot race,...
October 5, 2010
The lawyers doing the writing at the SEC are good. The 104-page novella the Commission released last week with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission gallops...
September 28, 2010
Remember that movie, The Truman Show? In this epochal fake reality program, a guy played by Jim Carrey lives on camera, unaware that reality is...
September 21, 2010
The Boii are back in town! I refer not to the 1976 rock hit by the Irishmen of Thin Lizzy, but to the central European...
September 7, 2010
Give yourself a break! Okay, we’ll give you one. We’re cycling from Prague to Vienna, a wedding anniversary trip, and won’t be within writing distance...
August 31, 2010
Do you think your stock trades well? While you ponder, a confession: We’re guilty of a bait and switch. If I’d written “implementation shortfall,” which...
August 24, 2010
Why do many stock prices move intraday by 3-5% or more when price spreads are in pennies? Before we answer, we enjoyed New Orleans last...
August 17, 2010
Thursday and Friday this week we’re in New Orleans sweating it out and moderating a Rapid Fire panel on hot topics at the NIRI Southwest...
August 10, 2010
What does the word “actionable” mean to you? It’s a decent name for a rock band, yes. But it means “what stuff can you do...
August 3, 2010
You’ve heard the saying “six of one, half-dozen of the other?” The DXY, the spot market for the US dollar, declined 7% in July. Stocks...
July 27, 2010
The saying goes that you’re better off keeping your mouth closed and looking like a fool than opening it and removing all doubt. Trading reminded...
July 20, 2010
We were in Lake Jackson, TX, last week for Karen’s HS reunion. South Texas is a sweat lodge this time of year, but the Saint...
July 13, 2010
Yesterday, I was forced to set aside comedian Dave Barry’s old book, Dave Barry is Not Taking This Sitting Down, and particularly his thoughtful essay...
July 7, 2010
Prior to the 4th of July you might have heard us jeer, “That’s about as exciting as Iowa.” Passing through last weekend, we had to...
June 29, 2010
Oscar Wilde said that illusion is the first of all pleasures. Of course he also wrote that anyone who lives within his means suffers from...
June 22, 2010
“The CFO wants to know why our stock is down when it should be up.” That’s the essence of conversations I had yesterday with two...
June 15, 2010
We were on the bikes at dawn in Denver where on the oval at Washington Park it was 45 degrees as the sun rose. That’ll...
June 10, 2010
Sorry to keep you waiting two extra days this week! We were in San Diego, where June Gloom outside contrasted with the festive mood filling...
June 1, 2010
REMINDERS: We’ll be bivouacked for NIRI National in booth 321 on the exhibit floor at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego next week. Stop...
May 25, 2010
Does it feel like the beatings will continue until morale improves? What’s happened today is straightforward: Investors and counterparties – think of it like vacationers...
May 18, 2010
Global Statistical Arbitrage is not nearly so good a name for a rock band as the one my lovely Karen quipped after cleaning the glass...
May 11, 2010
The late standup comedian Mitch Hedberg said: “A severed foot is the ultimate stocking stuffer.” I’m not sure that’s funny. But it segues to the...
May 4, 2010
In Denver we get sun, rain, snow, sleet, hail. And then comes the next day. Today, a clear, bright and breezy 75 degrees Fahrenheit, photographers...
April 27, 2010
Loveland Ski Resort an hour up I-70 from downtown Denver logged 26 inches of snow in the past five days. We’ve had to cover patio...
April 20, 2010
We hope none of you are marooned in Europe by volcanic ash. If you are, we’ll try to keep your minds off the extra money...
April 14, 2010
Spring finally tossed its verdant cape over the Denver Front Range. We saw it firsthand on our bikes from Sedalia to Palmer Lake last weekend,...
April 7, 2010
Sorry we’re late this week! We’re in Las Vegas and the Market Structure Map wanted to stay in Vegas, apparently. Program trading jumped about 10%...
March 30, 2010
Show me examples. When I was a fresh-faced goofy college kid, my Logic professor, who was Greek and credible with his Hellenic accent, would say...
March 23, 2010
This formidable IRO says to me, “Quast, here’s the deal. You say rational, fundamental investment is a tiny fraction of trading now and we’re all...
March 16, 2010
You’re at your desk doing a last copy edit on the shareholder letter for the annual report. You glance at your daily trading, as IR...
March 9, 2010
Ever since I started ModernIR in early 2005 we’ve been hindered by one thing: me. That’s why I’m delighted to announce a dramatic expansion of...
March 2, 2010
My lovely bride Karen said, “Maybe you should be less negative in the Market Structure Map.” Only fort-two and I’m turning into a grousing old...
February 23, 2010
What do air travel and equity markets have in common? As background, we’re readying a comment letter for the SEC’s Concept Release on Equity Market...
February 16, 2010
The derivative we need is a weather swap. The Winter Olympics would pay a premium for that spare snow lying around unused on the east...
February 9, 2010
What a blast we had in the high country skiing last week! But now, East Coast, we here in Denver would like our snow back,...
February 2, 2010
We’re late this week for a good reason: skiing. We hit the Vail slopes today (and as the comedian said, “We’re here all week!”) See...
January 26, 2010
January 19, 2010
Hope you enjoyed MLK Weekend! We were on bikes for the first time in Twenty Ten as temperatures tickled the high 50s Saturday and Sunday...
January 12, 2010
Thought for the day: “Chaotic action is preferable to orderly inaction.” – Will Rogers Speaking of chaotic action, let’s review trading basics. We tend to...
January 5, 2010
Happy New Year! I grew up in the Snake River Breaks northwest of Boise. In tiny Huntington, where I quarterbacked the eight-man high-school football team,...
December 29, 2009
We’re back after a refreshing one-week break! Here in Denver we packed the house with visitors, the kitchen with delicacies, the slopes with our skis,...
December 15, 2009
Tis the season for expirations, the keyhole onto institutional risk-management. The shuffle started Friday Dec 11, when risk-management trading dominated. You won’t see it in...
December 8, 2009
Denver is an icebox, so we went east to New York to warm up. Lovely here, the tree glittering at Rockefeller Center and the snowflakes...
December 1, 2009
I’m moderating the NIRI Virtual Chapter meeting on modern equity markets tomorrow 12/1 at noon ET. See nirivirtual.org for details. As I move the midsection...
November 24, 2009
It’s almost Thanksgiving, and the sun-splashed snow along Denver’s South Pearl Street is festive! Groping for reflective thoughts this holiday season we found humorist Dave...
November 17, 2009
We’ve gone and done it. We’re moving the Market Structure Map to a blog, to invite comments (so please comment!). Don’t worry, we’re not about...
November 10, 2009
If you think “tail risk” is what happens if you grab a cat by the tail, well, that’s not far off. Did you know that...
November 3, 2009
Mother Nature and Denver last week were like a samba episode of Dancing with the Stars, twirling furiously. In fact, snow torpedoed my trip to...
October 27, 2009
We’ll spend the bulk of today’s note explaining why small-cap stocks increasingly find their shareholdings dominated by a few large quantitative institutions. First this on...
October 20, 2009
A word on the markets: options expired last week, while swaps and counterparty agreements pegged to volatility measures lapse tomorrow. Speculation and risk management trading...
October 5, 2009
The New York Yankees led the American league this year with a team batting average of 29% (.290). Is it just curious coincidence that IROs...
Tim Quast
Founder, President & CEO
Karen Quast, CPA
SVP – Chief Financial Officer
Brian Leite
VP – Head of Client Services
Brian Wilson
Director – Client Services
Perry Grueber
Director – Client Services
