Observe. Orient. Decide. Act. OODA.

This is how Pipeline Trading describes its predictive analytics for helping buyside customers identify large-block trading opportunities.

For those of you who missed the news that rocked The Street this week, Pipeline, a dark pool, was fined $1 million by the SEC for misleading clients about the nature of its liquidity.

Were you harmed? Check to see if your shares trade at Pipeli—

Oh. You can’t. It’s a dark pool. You don’t know if your shares trade there unless Pipeline’s orders route to your listing exchange.

Of Pipeline, SEC Enforcement Director Robert Khuzami said in a statement: “Investors are entitled to accurate information as to how their trades are executed.”

Pipeline offers a platform where institutional customers like mutual funds can find “natural liquidity,” or real orders from other buysiders. What’s more, Pipeline provides execution algorithms that mimic how high-frequency traders try to project price and volume in order to place profitable trades ahead of moves. If the buyside can beat HFT at its own game, then instead of being victimized, it can also generate alpha – market-beating returns on trades. Continue reading →

We’re late this week due to celebrations around the anniversary of the rebellion from the Crown. We played croquet, appropriately and cheekily British we thought (no offense to our good friends and former overlords across the pond). Croquet has actual rules we learned.

Sunday, Karen and I loaded the bikes and set out with good friend Jeffrey to conquer the passage between two of Colorado’s tall “fourteeners” named Princeton and Harvard. We rode from the Arkansas Valley floor at 8,000 feet up Cottonwood Pass (which sounds like “cotton whupass”) from Buena Vista to the summit at 12,126 feet and a stunning view of the fruited plain.

Choosing a route from point A to point B had me thinking about stock trades (you do this long enough, that’ll happen to you too). Stock trades must have routes. Sometimes it happens automatically. Whether orders for shares in your stock meet their matches internally at Barclays or by dint of timing, routing, pricing and chance at Susquehanna’s dark pool, RiverCross, often is a matter of routing. Even online brokers afford ways to route trades now. Continue reading →

Want to know about dark pools? Join the NIRI Virtual Chapter at noon eastern time Wednesday May 25.

I’m moderating the discussion. The all-star panel includes Nicole Olson of storied dark pool Liquidnet; Adam Sussman of expert market-structure research firm TABB Group; and Joe Saluzzi at Themis Trading, one of today’s leading voices on the nature of trading markets. You know him from Bloomberg, 60 Minutes and CNBC.

Two weeks ago at the NIRI finale for the season here in Denver, we were indulging in the benefits of having brewery Molson Coors in the chapter. And someone was talking to me about “black pools.”

I thought, “IR folks don’t get dark pools yet.”

This afternoon an IR pro in California emailed, asking how to figure out what percentage of their shares trade in dark pools. You can’t know, exactly. Continue reading →

NBBO would be a good name for a rock band. But it stands for “National Best Bid or Offer.” It also appears to be some kind of joke, because everyone tries to avoid it.

The NBBO stems from legislation passed in 1975 by Congress to create a national market system. If you’re already snoozing, you’ll miss the good stuff. You cannot make up stories like this.

Back in the 1900s, several cases involving the NYSE and other exchanges and their proprietary data reached the Supreme Court. In each, the Court held that exchanges possessed an undeniable right to their proprietary quotations.

In other words, where we take for granted now that quotes for stocks are as basic a right as breathing, it used to be that keeping those quotes secret was as basic a right as breathing. (Since our markets flourished then and gasp now, we’d be idiots not to wonder which approach was correct.) Continue reading →

You might think “OTC” stands for “off the charts,” which is how we’d rate both the skiing in Winter Park last week and the 70-degree temperatures in Denver Sunday that allowed me to get a post-skiing tan on the back deck.

Actually, OTC stands for “over the counter.” It describes brokers doing business directly with each other, and it’s a big reason why NYSE Euronext and the Deutsche Bourse (everybody spells it differently) are merging.

Our friend David Weild, former vice-chair at the Nasdaq and current market-structure expert at Grant Thornton said of the impending deal: “Scale, scale, scale.” Duncan Niederauer, expected to lead the combined entity, said today: “This is an industry that lends itself to scale.” It seems that what began here in 1792 under the Buttonwood Tree at the foot of Wall Street is at an end of sorts. Why?

Businesses need scale when markets are commoditized and currencies debased. But beyond that, it’s the result of monumental revitalization of the over-the-counter market. Big brokers are trading with each other, avoiding exchanges. And because they are experts at managing risk, institutions choose them not just for execution but as counterparties for transferring risk from asset class to asset class. This is fast becoming the main reason that natural liquidity – trading lingua franca for shares not driven by high-speed intermediaries – moves around. Continue reading →