Denver is an icebox, so we went east to New York to warm up. Lovely here, the tree glittering at Rockefeller Center and the snowflakes magically materializing to music on the Saks & Co. façade. Festive!

Carmen Barone and the Barclays team graciously hosted me yesterday on the NYSE trading floor, and in the afternoon Marge Wywras at Knight Capital Group turned me loose with the traders on the Knight floor in Jersey City. That’s darned near a perfect business day to me. Continue reading →

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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We’ll spend the bulk of today’s note explaining why small-cap stocks increasingly find their shareholdings dominated by a few large quantitative institutions.

First this on equity markets: Last week we noticed a surge in “volatility trading.” We’ve written before about these tactics that capitalize on volatility as the asset instead of the direction of the markets or a given security.

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