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 authorizing trillions of dollars of spending. But I digress.
Illustration 22981930 / Stock Trading © John Takai | Dreamstime.com
Investor relations professionals, when was the last time you called somebody – at an exchange or a broker – to try to find out what’s going on with your stock? I can’t recall when the Nasdaq launched the Market Intelligence Desk but it was roughly 2001.
Twenty years ago. I was a heavy user until I learned I could dump trade-execution data from my exchange into my own Excel models and see which firms were driving ALL of my volume, and correlate it to what my holders told me.
That was the seed for ModernIR.
Today, market behaviors and rules are much different than they were in 2001. Active money back then was still the dominant force but computerized speculation was exploding. What started in the 1990s as the SOES Bandits (pronounced “sews”) – Small Order Execution System (SOES) – was rapidly metastasizing into a market phenomenon.
Regulation National Market System took that phenomenon and stamped it on stocks. What was a sideshow to ensure retail money got good deals now IS the stock market.
Nearly all orders are small. Block trades are about a tenth of a percent of total trades. For those struggling with the math, that means about 99.9% (not volume, trades) aren’t blocks. The trade-size in the stocks comprising the S&P 500 averaged 108 shares the past week. All-time record low.
Realize, the regulatory minimum for quoting and displaying prices is 100 shares. Trades below that size occur at prices you don’t even see. I have a unique perspective on market machinery. I’ve spent 26 years in the IR profession, a big chunk of that providing data on market behaviors to public companies so they know what’s going on (the starting point for good management).
Now I run a decision-support platform too for active traders that gives them the capacity to understand changing supply/demand trends in stocks – the key to capturing gains and avoiding losses when trading (we say take gains, not chances). And I trade stocks too. I know what it means when my NVDA trade for 50 shares executes at the Nasdaq RLP for $201.521.
Yes, a tenth of a penny. It means my broker, Interactive Brokers, routed my trade to a Retail Liquidity Program at the exchange, where a Fast Trader like Citadel Securities bought it for a tenth of a penny better than the best displayed price, and was paid about $0.015 for doing so.
For those struggling to calculate the ROI – return on investment – when you spend a tenth of a penny to generate one and a half pennies, it’s a 1400% return. Do that over and over, and it’s real money. Fast Trading is the least risky and most profitable business in the stock market. You don’t have to do ANY research and your investment horizon is roughly 400 milliseconds, or the blink of an eye. Time is risk.
For the record, NVDA trades about 300,000 times per day. Do the math.
Which leads to today’s Market Structure Map singularity – infinite value. Trades for less than 100 shares sent immediately for execution – that’s a “market order” – must by law be executed. The Securities Exchange Commission has mandated (does the SEC have that authority?) a “continuous auction market” wherein everything is always buying or selling in 100-share increments or less.
So algorithms almost always chop trades into pieces smaller than 100 shares that are “marketable” – meant to execute immediately. And retail traders are browbeaten relentlessly to never, ever, ever enter marketable trades. Only limit orders. That ensconces information asymmetry – an advantage for machines. Every time I send a marketable trade for execution, I have to check a box acknowledging that my trade is “at the market.”
That’s the truth. Algorithms pulverize orders into tiny pieces not to make them look like tiny trades, but because tiny trades are required by law to execute. Large trades are not. Limit orders are not. Those both may or may not match. But tiny trades will. There’s one more piece to that puzzle – the market-making exemption from short-locate rules. For more on that, go to the youtube channel for sister company EDGE and watch my presentation on meme stocks at The Money Show.
Moral of the story: The entire structure of the stock market is tilted toward the people and the machines who actually know what’s going on, and away from those who don’t.
Now. What do you know about the stock market, investor-relations professionals? You are head of marketing for the stock. Got that? Do you know how the stock market works?
If you don’t, you need us. We know exactly how it works, and exactly what’s going on, all the time. You should have that information in your IR arsenal.
Nothing is more important. It’s the starting point.
