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 →

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 →

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 →