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 Barry’s mother, who told him these immortal words long ago: “Son, it’s better to be rich and happy than poor and sick.” As Dave Barry observed, “That makes sense, even in these troubled times.”

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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 to start tweeting. But I do like the interactivity at the blog. We’ll dual track with the email awhile, then move to alerts about the weekly post.

In the Michael Jackson movie “Just Do It,” the legend is backed by a cadre of dancers in one scene, who, through “green screen” technology are replicated so that it appears to viewers to be a vast dancing army.

Vast Dancing Army would be a good name for a rock band. And Green Screen might be at work in the equity markets. Is trading real, or replications that create an illusion meant to mimic reality?

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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 an entire institutional subset is focused on the risk relative to theoretically ending up with a handful of grabbed cat? We’ll come to that in a minute, and how it might affect your stock.

First, these markets. Real, or more statistical arbitrage? Checking the data, something very unusual occurred last week. On November 4 in our data, the volumes we call electronic and speculative were dead, spot-on, even, at 35.8% of the total, each. That day, divergence in major market measures ceased, and volumes turned bullish. It stood out to us.

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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 Boston, but only after an hour floundering through a foot of slush to the airport at an average speed of 25 mph. And today it’s 70 degrees on the Front Range.

Switching gears, I owe a mea culpa. We’ve berated the exchanges for fueling conditions that constrain real investment – fragmentation, rebates, direct access, sponsored access, high-frequency trading, flash orders etc, et al, since data and transactions are keys to exchange prosperity. But Duncan Niederauer’s interview in the weekend Wall Street Journal (see link below) was the best call yet for return to capital formation in the equity markets. I am now cooking up a comfort-food casserole of crow in the crock pot.  I did drop a note to Mr. Niederauer saying so, too.

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