Good to see you folks in Boston last week. But I needed Denver to thaw me out. It was seventy here last Saturday. I washed the car in T-shirt and flip flops.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. So it goes at the Nasdaq.

Last autumn the exchange proposed to charge small-cap companies fees of up to $100,000 to incentivize market-makers to trade small-cap ETFs, arguing to the SEC that it would infuse thinly traded securities with liquidity. The rule would have required the SEC, FINRA and the exchange itself to reverse longstanding prohibitions on paying market makers to trade securities. For certain exceptions only (of course, exchanges pay billions of dollars in rebates to “liquidity providers” each year).

The SEC promptly rejected the rule-filing. Now it’s back. See it here.

IR folks, do you know the adage about being wise as serpents but meek as doves? Question what you hear from exchanges that rely on data and transactions – not issuers – for revenue and profits. Take nothing at face value. Examine the facts. Continue reading →

 Apparently, exchanges are not bastions of deep liquidity.

 In a bombshell dropped at a congressional hearing yesterday, top executives for the NYSE and the Nasdaq proposed – to borrow from humorist Dave Barry, we SWEAR we are not making this up – that you pay them fees, small-cap companies, which they will distribute to market-makers to incentivize trading in ETFs that trade your shares.

 Exchanges already incentivize most trades, but in the hundred most liquid names there’s great profit in the data off the consolidated tape. You small-caps offer no profit. So in addition to charging you listing fees, they now want to charge you market-making fees – but in the ETFs that hold your stocks.

 Congresspersons unfamiliar with how arbitrage works and how ETFs are principally one-day investment vehicles won’t see through this self-serving and patently ridiculous proposal. The SEC may also overlook the glaring contradiction to well-functioning capital markets and approve it. Public companies don’t read exchange proposals as they should and don’t comment on them.  No opposition? Approved.

 For more, we’ve asked permission to re-run a blog post today by Joe Saluzzi at Themis Trading: Continue reading →

There’s a saying: It’s easier to keep the cat in the bag than to get it back in there once you’ve let it out. Nobody is likely to stuff the Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) cat back in the bag.

Because ETFs are miraculous.

The biblical story of creation is that something came from nothing. Same with the Christian concept of redemption – being bought for a price without rendering equal worth in kind.

Today, we’ll share with occupants of the IR chair the divine story of how ETFs work.

Before ETFs were closed-end mutual funds. Closed end funds (CEFs) are publicly traded securities that IPO to raise capital and pursue a business objective (like any business), in this case an investment thesis. Traded units have a price, and the net asset value rises and falls on the success of managers in achieving objectives. The rub with CEFs is that share value can depart from net asset value – just like stocks often separate from intrinsic business worth.

The investment industry, with support from regulators, devised ETFs to magically remedy through Creation and Redemption this fault of nature. ETF kingpin iShares, owned by Blackrock, illustrates here, with a clever floral analogy (thank you Joe Saluzzi at Themis Trading who alerted us to it). You don’t have to buy individual flowers and face market risks because iShares puts them in a bouquet for you. Great idea. Continue reading →

While Irene splashed Wall Street, we Coloradans reveled in the ridden glory of the USA Pro Cycling Challenge. The 500-mile route hosted 130 of the world’s top cyclists including Tour de France winner Cadel Evans and both runners-up, Luxembourgers Andy and Frank Schleck.

We were there, clanging bells and hooting our hearts out. Here is winner Levi Leipheimer readying for the time trial that put him in yellow. The peloton left Avon here for Steamboat, and Levi is visible midway in yellow. At the finish, some 250,000 jammed downtown Denver for the epic, lapping conclusion. We are proud of American cycling and our state’s awesome organizational effort.

Speaking of peloton, Wall Street Journal reporter John Jannarone wrote Monday in the Heard column called “Traders Seek Salvation from Correlation” about how stocks race in formation. It’s among the best pieces we’ve seen on modern trading. Jannarone says that S&P 500 stocks show 80% correlation in the past month, meaning eight in ten move synchronously.

This is a source of distress for IR folks trying to distinguish a strong company story from the herd. We’d argue that rather than slamming the collective IR noggin into the burgeoning brick wall of macro-focus investing that you instead track program trading and establish what level is acceptable – and use it as an IR success measure. We wrote about this last week, so we won’t retrace the trodden path.

Why a mirror image across so much of the market? One driver Jannarone posits is Exchange-Traded Fund investing. According to Credit Suisse, these drive some 30% of daily stock volume. Jannarone also notes that trading in S&P 500 E-mini futures contracts is more than four times the combined daily volume of the two biggest S&P 500 ETFs, the SPDR, and iShares S&P 500 Index ETF. Continue reading →

Loveland Ski Resort an hour up I-70 from downtown Denver logged 26 inches of snow in the past five days. We’ve had to cover patio plants the past two nights as temperatures dipped to 30. It’s bright and clear. But winter has had a hard time letting go this year.

Meanwhile in Europe, Morgan Stanley launched a lending book for European Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) today. Here is the key to understanding financial reform currently mucking up Congress. It encapsulates everything that’s wrong with today’s capital markets. Continue reading →