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 YouTube montage is homage. Speaking of creating stuff, stocks lately saw the longest 2015 rally…
View pageWhy 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 well. That would be true if 100% of the money in the market was sorting…
View page“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 spoke on ETFs. “Yet we’re tracking oil.” In Michael Lewis’s brilliant The Big Short, a…
View pageSuppose gas prices changed 3% daily. Pretty soon everyone would look for patterns in volatility and start rushing to fill tanks at low ebbs. Or maybe there’d be a Gasoline Closing Cross, where petrol consumers would cue and then all…
View page“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 it at the Alamo. So we’re glad to be inside Austin’s city limits sponsoring the…
View pageInvestor-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 satchels stuffed with brushes, a voice saying, “Excuse me, ma’am, do you have a couple…
View pageCredit Suisse. Deutsche Bank. ITG. Pipeline. Barclays. UBS. BNP Paribas. Citadel. Goldman Sachs. Liquidnet. Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Citigroup. What commonality unites these firms? All have been fined for violating rules on so-called dark pools, private stock-trading venues. At…
View pageWe thought we were going to need a boat. Driving into Kansas City, a torrent fell in such proportion that the sky, the landscape, the topography of the roadway, disappeared into a pelting gloom that had our wipers humming on…
View pageMoney is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons. So wrote Woody Allen for himself as Broadway Danny Rose in the eponymous 1984 film. I’m not sure what Allen meant then as I was a high-school sophomore wearing a…
View pageI recall knowing one particularly volatile fellow. I should have called him VIX. Speaking of the VIX, options on that popularly titled Fear Gauge expire today as a raft of S&P components report results. Many will see sharp moves in…
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