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 handled the outage correctly. Humans want pictures of perfection like Saturday’s Balloon Rodeo in Steamboat…
View pageThe 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. Galleries cluster the square, yes. We loved our circuitous bike ride along the foothills to…
View pageAs 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, the cost of transferring it to somebody else. Today the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee…
View pageThe 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 Clemens articulate the difference between the price of ignorance and the consequence of arrogance. I…
View pageThe 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 around the opening bell and the last half-hour, with volume dribbling otherwise. NYSE strategists are…
View pageWhat’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. Since elementary explanations are often incorrect, there’s been a loss of confidence. “We broke through…
View pageSome 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 so? To get there let’s take a trip. I love driving the Llano Estacado, in…
View pageIn 1884, British comedian Arthur Roberts invented a card game of trickery and nonsense for which he coined the name “Spoof.” In 2015, spoofing is a decidedly unfunny and ostensibly illegal trading technique in securities markets. But the joke may…
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