When investors buy and sell shares, what happens?

The logical answer is “stocks go up and down.” Let’s get more specific. Among the 20 largest asset managers at the end of 2009, ten were bank-owned, says consulting firm Towers Watson. The five largest – Blackrock, State Street, Allianz, Fidelity and Vanguard – are independents that pass the preponderance of their buying and selling through the biggest sellside firms on passive equity and ETF trading programs.

The banks behind ten of the twenty largest asset managers include BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan, BNY Mellon, Credit Agricole, UBS, Goldman Sachs, HSBC and Bank of America.

The top ten futures brokers for 2009 were Newedge (Societe General/Credit Agricole joint venture), Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, UBS, BofA, MF Global, Morgan Stanley and Barclays. Continue reading →

Why are markets dropping like the thermometer at 8pm on Pike’s Peak?

Debt chaos, sour economic data, sure. We’re not market prognosticators, we track behavioral data. Under the skin of the news at market level, institutions shifted to managing portfolio risk about July 21. These events were observable. Algorithmic execution changed, and we saw what started it and what followed.

Large diversified asset managers swapped out of equities. That means they assigned the risk in portfolios to others through agreements that traded risk for safety at a cost. Why not just say “investors sold to manage risk”? It’s not accurate and it won’t be reflected in settlement data.

Of course, hedging produces a range of consequences too. Those underwriting hedges themselves hedge the risk they assume. That prompts speculating in whatever instruments are being used to hedge the hedges. The idea is to offset every point of exposure – like double-entry accounting, a credit for every debit.

Consider the Treasurys market – the one in peril till today. Primary dealers ranging from Banc of America to Goldman Sachs make markets in Treasurys. Average daily trading volume in Treasurys is more than $500 billion. Bond trading in total in the US averages more than $950 billion daily and nearly 80% is government securities.

Continue reading →

My flight today to Cincinnati through Atlanta froze in the blizzard of lost travel dreams. Which proved fortuitous, as I was able to skip Atlanta and flight straight to Cincinnati, saving me five hours. I love blizzards.

Speaking of sharing personal details, Facebook is the biggest entrepreneurial deal of the current day. It’s also a focal point for the widening divide between public markets and growth enterprises. Facebook may or may not go public. If it does, much of its prodigious progress will already have been funded, and the public markets will serve more as a wealth-transfer device than a capital-raising tool.

It’s a microcosm for investor relations. Speaking of speaking, I’m at the NIRI Tri-State Chapter tomorrow for what I have assured my hosts will be a riveting exploration of how to be cool in an IR seat heated to silliness by transient trading. Hope to see you locals there, by sled, snowmobile or telemark!

Anyway, according to the stock-market newsletter Crosscurrents, the average holding time for institutional positions is now 2.8 months. “The theory that buy-and-hold was the superior way to ensure gains over the long term, has been ditched completely in favor of technology,” writes Alan Newman, its author. Continue reading →

Should we ban nakedness?

The SEC thinks so. Continuing a raft of rules in response to the Flash Crash, the commissioners voted last week to restrict “naked access,” or trading at somebody else’s terminal.

Executives and IR professionals, you’ll get questions. Your shares are affected by these rules. What do you know about naked access, and is stopping it good? Continue reading →

We were in Lake Jackson, TX, last week for Karen’s HS reunion. South Texas is a sweat lodge this time of year, but the Saint Augustine grass lies lush and luminescent under the sycamores and live oaks. And we saw not one tar ball on Surfside Beach in Freeport.

A word on trading: We expected money to move after options expirations, but changes to program-trading plans came early, on July 14, we observed in the data. So with expirations July 15-16, markets were shellacked when money shifted to other assets. The past two days have given us massive arbitrage around this shift and ahead of tomorrow’s volatility expirations. Thus, the week could end on a rough note, we fear. Continue reading →