Market Structure EDGE Blog
Market Structure EDGE Blog
Which Way
http://modernir.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/MSM041421.mp3 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 and That Way in LJ. And yes, that rhymes. And yes, it’s a metaphor for the stock...
Fama Market
http://modernir.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/MSM040721.mp3 Eugene Fama, Booth School, Univ of Chicago 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 explain. The S&P 500 is...
Suez on Wall
The stuff Archegos used expires today. Sound like Greek? Courtesy SEC.gov Let me explain. A hedge fund blew up. Its counterparties are taking huge hits. There are ramifications. What happens? Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. First, let’s understand “counterparty.” A...
Cash in Lieu
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. And then history kicks in. There’s no such thing as “multiple expansion,” the explanation offered for why stocks with...
March 17: The machination of machines!
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 calendar. Board presentations, ASMs, virtual analyst conferences and investor days. You just finish year-end events and Q1 reporting is rushing...
Reg Efdy and Thee
http://modernir.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/MSM031021.mp3 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. And it matters to you, public companies and investors. Speaking...
The Missing Wall
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 yes, the image here is not a missing wall but the walls you can ski at Steamboat. To our story, investors and public companies need to...
Maxine Waters
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 supposed culprits in the Great Gamestop Mania before itself. And it wasn’t about financial misdeeds,...
Big Cheese Grater
Good offense beats good defense.These five words are the heartbeat of the Saban Dynasty in football at Alabama – and the reason for the Gamestop trade in the stock market. Promise, this piece isn’t about sports. It’s about how retail traders killed institutions. It...
Metastable
http://modernir.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/MSM021021.mp3Editorial 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 week you’re stuck again with me. -TQ...
Market Structure Basics
Roll Call
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 more poignant this time for my Aggie, Karen, and the many friends and family hailing from College Station. Gig’em, Aggies....
Money for Nothing
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 still a long way from Phantom of the Opera, Wicked, and Lion King, theater’s billion-dollar trio. Hamilton is...
Benjamin Graham
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 because the market always reflects what the money is doing, and it’s not Ben Graham’s...
Reg Nemesis II
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 equity markets there gurgles an emergent leviathan (maybe I should choose different imagery – but we’ll talk about...
What’s Changed
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 Mar 13 to delay skiing in Steamboat till the next day (it was Fri the 13th after all). The next day the slopes closed for...
Blocking Volatility
The NYSE has proposed lowering the fee for trading to $0.10/100, or a tenth of a penny per share, or 10 mils. Did you know there’s a booming market where brokers routinely pay eight cents per share or $8.00/100 shares? What market? Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs). We’re...
Rules and Money
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, information about what’s pricing a stock must derive from the rules that govern stock-trading, and how...
Ticking Down
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 launched that battleship into the markets. Two years later the tick study is limping to port in a lifeboat. For those of you thinking...
Streaming Market
Spotify ditched convention with its direct listing on the NYSE. It didn’t raise money or ring the opening bell. It gave shareholders a way out. It’s a touchstone for the state of the capital markets. CrunchBase says Spotify has raised $2.6 billion in 22 funding...
Auctioning Profits
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 open day-end auctions to exchanges that don’t have listings. (Editorial note: The SEC has now approved the BATS...