I wonder what he’d think of the relationship between the US dollar and equities, where this small action produces that decidedly unequal reaction.

After the Federal Reserve acted to shore up bank balance sheets by buying long bonds and mortgage-backed securities last week, the dollar trampolined and markets dropped like Newton’s apple.

Pundits blamed dismal economic data. Yet we saw money market-wide shifting from equities September 16 with quad-witching. Before the Fed offered a dim economic portrait. If money was reacting, it sure had a funny, proactive, organized way of showing it.

Today and Monday, the dollar weakened and stocks zoomed skyward in a Newton-flummoxing frenzy to reclaim paradise lost. How many believe this is rational investment behavior? If you do, there’s a solar-panel plant in California that might interest you.

Also today, the SEC proposed reducing trading-halt thresholds and calibrating them to the S&P 500. Circuit breakers would interdict trading if the index falls seven percent. That’s down from current triggers tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average at 10% off.

Monday, the Securities Technology Monitor, a trading periodical, reported that 72% of fund managers surveyed by Lodestar Research were concerned about their methodologies for calculating risk-exposure in markets.

All these things are related. Stocks and dollars are a laboratory example of the butterfly effect from value uncertainty in both. The gap between actions and their reactions are growing alarmingly disparate because uncertainty must be hedged by something unseen. Yin moves from yang to double- or triple-yang.

It should be no surprise that institutions are most concerned about managing risk with automated systems. What’s it say about our markets when the resonant timbre is not opportunity but threat?

And regulators. They don’t know what’s happening because their data are fragmented. Welcome to the public-company club, SEC. Somehow it’s acceptable for regulators to propose spending billions on their monitoring systems while the participants whose fair treatment regulators exist to ensure labor with a shattered and inchoate view of who trades their shares and where – thanks to rules.

Does this seem dissonant? Like the market?

Last week we sent a group note to key folks at FINRA and the SEC and a couple congressional staffers saying there are 5,500 volunteer policemen out here who’d like markets to function properly. Public companies. After 18 months of talking and talking, we now know that FINRA can authorize exchanges to provide the missing data to public companies through a simple rule filing.

The good news is that we need no act of Congress to modernize trading data for public companies. And yet here labor on public companies in dark chaos still, as regulators flail about trying to control the movement of stocks.

What’s so hard here? The apple is lying there, right by the tree. Toss it over, or at least throw public companies a bone.

How many recognize this as a currency-devaluation? Markets jumped 4% here in the U.S. as the DXY, the dollar index, dropped.

Last Sunday, the European Central Bank pledged to monetize debts of Italy and Spain. Monday, markets plunged globally. That’s a currency-devaluation. The central bank is promising to increase the supply of currency without a corresponding increase in economic output.

Most blamed S&P’s downgrade of US debt. But the dollar strengthened, and Treasurys increased in value. Why would the diminished instruments be more valuable?

Because that’s not what caused markets to tank.

Last Wednesday the central banks of Japan and Switzerland devalued their currencies. Thursday, August 4, markets plunged. Many blamed debt talks. How, pray tell? That’s an assumption without buttressing facts.

By contrast, we have three profound examples inside one week of the global relationship between currencies. As we noted last week, currency trading volume is over $4 trillion daily. US equities are $100 billion or so, on average.

The tail is wagging the dog. Following the cash – the only commodity that is increasing by leaps and bounds upon the planet – leads us directly to the cause.

Why do stocks move inversely with the US dollar? The currency that is supposed to reflect the valuable exchange of goods and services is instead being used to compensate for the absence of valuable exchange. When things go up and down relative to denominating currencies rather than intrinsic worth, it’s difficult for anyone to assign proper values to securities.

Why should you care in the IR chair? It’s an object lesson. If you measure your success by the way rational money responds, you are on a bridge to nowhere. We’re seeing rational investment activity plunging yet again. How can investors buy your stock when its value is often controlled by the ying and yang of the yen? Or the dollar. In one major technology company today, the percentage of rational investment activity dipped to 8% of volume. So 92% of its trading is driven by something or somebody else? Yup.

We suggest setting ranges for the amount of program trading, speculation and rational investment in your volume – so you’re measuring overall trading health rather than investment activity. Because unless all of us call for fixed rates of currency exchange so stocks have value driven by business worth rather than European bailouts, it’s not going to change soon.

Assessing what we know about data, it’s logical to think that US equities will continue to appreciate now into options expirations next week. If currencies are leveling out again on all this intervention, money flows to relative value. But with expirations, the relative value might reside somewhere else.

I don’t know about you, but to me this seems…unhealthy.

What if riding in the sun means peddling across Death Valley in the summer, while the rain is a passing shower in the Italian Dolomites?

Context is essential. Let’s apply the same thinking to decisions about stock-repurchases and dividends. Conventional wisdom has long held that both actions appeal to the kinds of stock buyers who hold securities and count on fundamentals.

No argument there. But ponder the third dimension in the IR chair. The first dimension is your story – what defines and differentiates your investment thesis. The second is targeting the kind of money that likes your story. The third dimension is the state of your equity store.

Your equity is a product, competing with other products, with unique supply and demand constraints. If you suppose that your story is correct for a particular buyer without considering whether the buyer can act on interest in your story, you’re leaving money on the table. So to speak.

For instance, if I want four Keith Urban tickets at Pepsi Center in October for no more than $50 each, I’m already sold on the investment thesis – “Keith Urban puts on a good show.” What if there are only two tickets available at $50? Well, I’m not the right buyer for the investment thesis, then.

Back to buybacks and dividends. Our data show that roughly 12.5% of volume on a given day is “rational,” or focused on fundamentals. The rest of the volume – nearly 90% — is either managing risk by tweaking with balances, or speculating on divergences. So if buybacks are designed to benefit money that buys and holds things of value, but that segment constitutes only 12.5% of the audience, are you matching message to audience? Context matters.

What’s more, much of the passive participation in your market depends on liquidity. Asset managers need it to control risk. Speculators – a bona fide constituency in any healthy market – game the changes in your liquidity.

Take high-frequency trading, which is both speculation and a form of risk-transfer or risk-management. It starts the day at zero, trades intraday, and ends at zero whenever possible. If you’re engaged in a buyback, often all you’ve created are magnified opportunities for short-term traders, who sell to your buyback manager’s algorithms to end the day and head home with profits, fleecing your company’s treasury. Without helping your target buyback audience.

Plus, the Federal Reserve is continuously depreciating the US dollar that denominates your earnings, which you hope to enhance by reducing outstanding shares. At best, it’s a wash. So why not cut out the middle man – all that noise in the market – and pay dividends straight to holders?

We’re not saying it’s the panacea for ages. But in the current market structure, the best thing you can do for fundamental investors is bestow cash on them. The market has sound and fury but limited rational substance.

The dollar dropped for a second straight day today. Stocks are again up, like they were yesterday. The dollar gained ground last Wed-Fri, and stocks fell.

This week marks the end of the month and quarter. We recommend in our IR Calendar that you consider some tactical timing as part of your overall IR strategy. Generally, the last few trading days of a quarter or month aren’t best for releasing good news. But they may be perfect for bad news.

Why? Institutions will be shoring up portfolio returns or managing exposure to market risk. They address risk by offsetting it with something that is inversely correlated. Notice that stocks and the dollar are inversely correlated. Notice that the dollar and other currencies, such as the Euro, are often inversely correlated.

All institutions try to generate yield from assets – managed money – through short-term trading. That’s what we’re seeing now. Money is trying to make up for a lackluster month through aggressive short-term trading. Is that investment? Only if you think any form of buying low and selling high, even in 30 microseconds, is investment. We call that speculation.

Back to macro behavior, markets execute transactions in currencies that are valued relative to other currencies today rather than fixed according to income or net worth of countries. Suppose the value of your house were tied to the value of houses in Greece. In a sense, it is, because the value of the currency in your pocket varies according to the one used in Greece, the Euro.

Now, think about all of these things from an investment standpoint. If the value of your house was a big part of your balance sheet – true for most of us – but it varied according to factors that had little to do with the supply or demand for houses of a kind and location like yours, or the particular distinguishing features of your house, would you be more or less inclined to buy a house?

You’d probably be less likely, right? Now translate these analogies to your IR program and the ends of months and quarters. Our measures show that some 85% of all daily volume is a form of short-term trading for yield, or risk-management activity to balance out exposure across many assets, not just stocks. Investors set the prices of stocks in our client base 20-30 times per year on average, while market prices are changing every day.

Investors are least likely to set prices at the ends of months and quarters, and during options expirations. There are bigger priorities, and 85% of money is moving en masse or chasing minute divergences. It’s not focused on investing in the neighborhood, so to speak.

Suppose you announced good news today. Your stock briefly separates from peers and the market – most times speculators are responsible. In the next two days it’s equalized by macro factors affecting large baskets of securities. This is your house getting valued with Greece, so to speak.

Conversely, if you put out bad news in the last three days of a month or quarter, traders and risk managers might buy your stock the following day or two anyway, simply because it temporarily diverged and now offers hedge or yield characteristics. Plus, who wants to sell a stock and hurt portfolio performance on the last trading day?

In new months, you have a better chance to stand out from the crowd. Why? Stock pickers have a long time to be rewarded – a full month!

These are realities in markets driven by machines and relative value. Turn them to your advantage wherever possible, by understanding them.

Sunday night after flying back from Antigua by way of Newark, I reviewed a week’s worth of client stock alerts for perspective. Stepping through a side exit and closing the door on life’s cacophony for a week, time stops. The return, the jolt of the madding crowd, is revealing. It’s amazing what you see.

More in a moment, but I promised some of you I’d share what we saw beyond the Truman Show. Apparently you can’t get from Denver to the French West Indies in a day on one airline, so we overnighted in Newark, touched down in Antigua, caught Eric Air, a fast little twin engine Cessna with a sharp-witted French pilot (Eric) and alighted in Guadeloupe.

Home for a week was a 70-foot catamaran. Our back yard stretched from Petite-Terre to Iles de Saintes, a coral-reefed shot of paradise where I put on scuba gear for the first time. By the looks on our faces off Marie Galante (where I needed a shave), you know we were on the Sea of Tranquility.

Speaking of needing a shave, that’s how the data looked when it slammed me out of the islands upon return. Careening commodities. Whole swaths of clients up and down 2-3% in waves over days. Chunks of erroneous trades, especially in health care stocks. Trend traders and programs for models and funds reversing course May 2 after the VIX euphoria that began April 20.

Seeing it at once was somewhat stunning. Does it mean anything, or is it simply more jarring en masse – like seeing your face after not shaving for a week, in my case? It’s a bit of both. Markets aren’t about to collapse by any means, but these rocking currents, sloshing white caps evident upon farther inspection, are what happens when prices become uncertain.

It may mean nothing ultimately. But a year ago, April 22-27 to be precise, we were telling clients how program traders had suddenly turned fearful. They furled sails and battened hatches with hedges (prices don’t drop then, they…coast). And they were right, as May 6, 2010 showed.

Having reviewed a chunk of data now post Guadeloupe, we see a disconnect forming between enthusiastic investors and cautious risk managers. It’s a buoy in the water for the wise that says there are shoals.

We’re just observers of data. We expect investors will navigate through the reef. But food for thought: Both economically and geographically, Greece is no island. If the Euro skids aground there, it’ll run the dollar up the mast. Stocks are a weight going the other way.

Fortunately, Lou Cordone, head of Thomson Advisory Services is not a doofus, so we balanced out.

We said last week we’d have big news about the Issuer Data Initiative? Thomson Reuters heard about the Initiative, examined its merits, and decided to lend a hand. They invited me to film a segment on their “Smart Topics” program for Thomson’s surveillance clients.

Thomson is a neutral party. But we cannot thank them enough – you too, because this effort is for public companies – for their kindness and generosity. See it from the IDI landing page, or click here.

More huge thanks are due. The office of the general counsel for a client, a major technology company, lent an editorial eye to the draft letter for Congress and the SEC. Thousands of dollars of legal work, pro bono. The petition is that much stronger. And we’re speaking again with the SEC the week of May 9 about the status of the Initiative.

If your company has yet to back it, sit your GC down and explain why it’s a must, and shoulder your support behind it here.

It’s about data. If you don’t have good data – on financial performance, lab experiments, climate change, how your stock trades, you name it – you can’t make informed and correct decisions. On average, about 25% of your volume will match up at your listing exchange, as we’ve pointed out. Even if the Nasdaq and the NYSE merged, the big problem remains: fully 50% of your trades meet elsewhere, and the exchanges aren’t providing those data.

To wit, yesterday at Direct Edge there were 84 issues that earned Clearly Erroneous Trade designations – occurring outside boundaries of acceptable price-fluctuation. Direct Edge isn’t to blame (we like the folks there); they’re the impresario. But those data don’t exist for you, no matter where you’re listed. It’s just volume on the consolidated tape – or lack thereof.

Some weeks ago, a large technology client updated guidance. Trading data that day at the exchange and what reported to Google, Yahoo! Finance, Bloomberg, et al differed by a whopping 16.5 million shares. How the exchange presented data did not jive with the way the consolidated tape distributed it. And 74% of volume met off the exchange in a black hole.

Data are the gateway to knowing why price and volume change. In your stock, in the market. For instance, did investment enthusiasm suddenly surge April 20 because – shazaam! – investors had not tabulated earnings correctly? We review data, and to use a scientific term, “Pffffththth.”

We see uniform events. Institutions took out insurance policies about April 6 for fear of markets, and then cashed them in with VIX expirations April 20. Brokers had to scrounge for shares to cover the policies. Markets soared.

Now everybody is following like it’s got substance. Maybe the followers will become the leaders and function will follow form. Maybe not. The answer is in the data.

We can’t help but voice the question that hangs in the aftermath of such musings: How come you’re expected to fulfill your fiduciary duty as stewards of the shareholder capital structure with incomplete and unreliable data?

Before anyone contemplates a merger between our major exchanges, seems to us public companies are owed an answer.

Closing note: The Map is on hiatus next week as we float the waters of a far tropical clime. We’ll bring you a report May 10.

It’s a decent name for a rock band, yes. But it means “what stuff can you do with this?”

Traders want actionable data – something to drive opportunity for profit. Investor-relations professionals want actionable tools – something that’ll improve stock ownership, share price, results of IR effort.

Knowing who owns your stock is good. But what actions can you take? Talk to sellers? That’s uncomfortable. Plus, unless you’re screwing up, selling is a compliment, an investment objective. The sellers should well buy again, when the time’s right.

How do you know the time’s right? Ownership and targeting data are fine but limited if you don’t know who or what is controlling your liquidity. Without knowing your trading behavior, it’s difficult to accurately measure actions, plot outreach, and target investors.

Money won’t simply take a flyer because you run a good business and your IR team is suave and debonair. Today, institutions cannot afford to buy stocks in a vacuum, without respect to how the first 1,000 shares alter baskets, ETFs, derivative trading tactics and all the rest swirling around your liquidity. Institutions mind risk-management obsessively now, which is about market structure.

We track data for a living. For clients, we graph volume from prop traders like RGM Advisors, against, say, executed order flow for Credit Suisse. We observe how the behaviors of the two are eerily similar in some issues (and not in others). RGM is a scientific, machine-learning trader.

Say you’re using Credit Suisse for support on a non-deal road show, but most of their volume is trend-driven. That knowledge should inform what investors you ask Credit Suisse to bring from its client ranks. You’ll want high-turnover GARP or growth money, because that’s the kind likely to wade into a mathematical market. It can be a win-win – Credit Suisse likes those customers, too.

Market structure can shape who you choose for support. Some firms have high-turnover clients because their trading products facilitate high-speed trading. If you’re after a different investor-class than what a sellside firm tends to serve, you might use a different firm with a lesser trading operation – and thus more dependence on its research. Great story isn’t enough. If your market structure doesn’t suit the money you’re targeting, you’ll waste a road trip.

IR professionals should become more tactical. Use the big picture to do it – beyond story, to structure. The final frontier for IR effectiveness rests on the actionable quality of market-structure data. Do you know how much of your daily volume is speculation? What kind of investor should you target tactically, in context of your IR strategy, if more than 50% of your volume is arbitrage? These are important things to know now.

Here’s a product announcement from Direct Edge yesterday:

ACK – SPX Accelerated Return Notes due September 30, 2011

CDK – SPX Capped Leveraged Index Return Note due July 27, 2010

ELD – WisdomTree Emerging Markets Local Debt Fund

MHM – SPX Market Index Target Term Securities due July 31, 2015

As products like these roll out each day, there’s something else for that money you’re meeting in Chicago to choose besides you. Kick it up a notch. Target more tactically. Sometimes you’re right for high-turnover hedge funds. That alone is a new notion. Then, be ready, using market structure as guide, to get on the radar of conventional fund investors before hedge funds rotate.

It’s not an exact science. But these are tools with abundant actions. If you’re expert in your own market structure, your results are going to be different from those of other IROs, because you’ll think differently about what actions you need to take.

You’ll be the IRO for the 21st century.

That’s the essence of conversations I had yesterday with two investor-relations officers. It’s tempting to suggest asking Al Gore about why things that should be up are instead down. But that’s an old joke. And it won’t make you more valuable in the IR chair.

What will enhance your value is knowing what to tell the CFO and how best to do it. Whether you provide a daily, weekly or quarterly update to management about factors behind your stock price, you should incorporate comments on your market structure. Not just the old conventional stuff.

Think of market structure this way. If you operated a retail store, and each week you summarized the state of things in your store for headquarters, you’d talk about financial performance, products moving off shelves, the traffic driving sales, and trends. Something like that, anyway.

Same with your stock’s “market structure.” There’s only one product, your shares. But otherwise, you’re assessing behaviors and measuring them to understand how your store serves its market. If you measure only one behavior or one group of customers, that’s not an accurate picture of what’s happening, and it’s bound to lead to head-scratching and questions like, “How come our stock is down when it should be up?”

What do you tell your management team about market structure? Well, say you’re providing a weekly brief on trading activity. First define your metrics – the things you’ll track. For a weekly report, you don’t want to bury them in mind-numbing data. You want a small set of consistent measures. Begin with things like the percentage premium or discount in your closing price for the week versus the trailing 20-day average price. Volume versus 20-day average. Daily average trades and shares per trade, and daily dollar flow – that is, average daily price multiplied by average daily volume.

In time, you can provide a forward-looking expectation from data – but you must accumulate metrics first. As your management team becomes accustomed to market structure information, move to simpler but more compelling information, derived from your data: What’s setting our price? What do investors think? What are traders and risk managers doing, as opposed to what investors think? What’s likely to happen to our price next? These conclusions are extrapolated from data.

Before you know it, you’ll own your market structure. You’ll be the expert on matters related to your trading. This is the first step in a larger process of making a home for market structure in the IR department just like corporate governance has become an IR bailiwick.

Why must you own your market structure? Because roughly 90% of volume today BEHAVES either according to market risk or in response to speculative opportunity, and only a small amount is rational, or seeking long-term returns. If IR spends 90% of its effort on 10% of the market, well, at least something should be known about the rest. Or else, how can you draw accurate conclusions about stock performance, or even investor sentiment?

It’s up to IR to set that agenda and drag management kicking and screaming into the 21st century of how trading markets work.

To conclude, a challenge for you IR readers: Look up the DXY – the dollar index futures contract – and compare it to the Dow Jones Industrial Average, over, say, the past year, or the three months around the May 6 Flash Crash. What does it show you?

Speaking of waking up, did you read Sebastian Mallaby’s article in the weekend Wall Street Journal called “Learning to Love Hedge Funds?” Going back to the first hedge fund in 1949, run by Alfred Jones, Mallaby contends that hedge funds represent the optimal risk-management model.  Government tries to prevent bad things from happening. Hedge funds, where owners put their money at risk and earn returns when profits are produced, view risk as a pathway to opportunity, but one marked by prudent insurance, or hedges, against downside.  Jones produced cumulative returns of 5,000% from 1949-1968, Mallaby notes.

We’ve long contended that the contemporary IR relationship palette should reflect a variety of hedge funds and turnover timeframes. In markets predicated on the making and taking of liquidity and the constant re-allocation of risk and capital, focusing only on buy-and-hold investors is like offering a Monet to a Jackson Pollock collector.  You’ve got a nice product for the wrong buyer.

That leads to current markets.  Let’s talk again about “high frequency trading.” During a panel on trading at NIRI last week, Liquidnet’s John Adam, always an outstanding panelist, mused that “the only thing everybody agrees on about the definition of high frequency trading is that it’s trading at high frequency.”

Great assessment! There’s a bewildering variety of means and methods today by which parties large and small using networks both discrete and diffuse engage in the rapid putting and taking of shares for profit. We shouldn’t mistake it for investing. 

Here’s an analogy.  There are trillions of dollars moving through global markets.  Consider it a barge on land that must be scooted across the ground. If you’re moving a barge overland, you’ll roll it on logs, pulling the last one in the line and putting it in front and continuing to motivate the barge along.

In trading markets, everybody is moving logs now, from hedge funds, to exchanges, to institutions, to broker-dealers. The barge isn’t the best source of profit anymore; moving logs is.   Some high-frequency traders make money by collecting a fee for pulling the logs from behind and others for putting them into place at the front. Some profit by taking the logs from each other and moving them, and some by moving the logs faster than other log movers.  But it’s all intermediary service, for a fee.

While the mix of this activity varies widely from issuer to issuer, in general some 70% of volume is high-speed log-moving, and over 90% of volume is either speculatively driven – a form of intermediation or trading on gaps – or program-driven, which is managing the allocation of risk and capital.

People blame hedge funds for this.  Hedge funds would do the exact opposite, were they in charge of managing risk. These conditions we have now are what you get when you put government in charge of managing risk. What happens is that the best log movers become the most profitable enterprises. 

And you’ve got problems if the log movers decide not to move logs anymore. 

Speaking of which, we reiterate what we said last week. Despite strong market moves this week, we remain concerned that quantitative order flow might take sudden leave. Programs are responsible for positive performance since June 8. We can see it in the data. We cannot possibly predict what that means. But the allocation of risk and capital is transient today. That makes us wary.

Attendance jumped from last year. A few new firms joined the lineup on the boulevards in the exhibit hall. One first-time attendee working in corporate governance said as we sat by the fire pit Monday night and watched the party crowd and the live band and the oddity of the evening, a young woman rolling around on the pool in a giant see-through inflated ball, “You NIRI folks are the nicest conference goers I’ve ever met.”

Investor-relations types are people people. Who like to party.

There’s not a lot of partying in the equity markets yet. While the IR tribe whooped it up in San Diego, the markets didn’t. We’d expected better. We wrote two weeks ago that hedge resets on May 21 (think of them like climbing cams keeping you anchored to the rock face on Switzerland’s Eiger), signaled better things for a brief spell. But days later on May 26, something rippled portfolio trading schemes. Alert reader Eric Boni at Ashland Inc. said to us, “Could it be the MSCI rebalance?”

These rebalances and other forms of risk-management are often why markets seem schizophrenic. Last week on a similar jobs report to the one we got today the market kamikazes 300 points. Today, it’s up 2% so far. What gives?

There’s arbitrage, as we described last week. Compare big ETFs like QQQ, SPY and EEM, which track the Nasdaq 100, the S&P 500 and global emerging markets. You’d think they’d diverge more since they aren’t the same things. But with most trading behind them arbitrage, they look like each other instead of the segments they approximate. Or so it seems.

There’s also leverage. Back to MSCI. EEM, the ETF noted above, is an MSCI product in the iShares family bought by BlackRock from Barclays. It’s a $35 billion ETF that mirrors the MSCI Emerging Markets Index. MSCI was Morgan Stanley Capital International, a Morgan Stanley subsidiary that first created index investment products in 1969. In 2004, MSCI acquired Barra, Inc., a risk-analysis software firm, which combined to form publicly traded MSCI Inc. (NYSE:MXB), no longer affiliated with Morgan Stanley. In March this year, MSCI said it would acquire RiskMetrics, the risk-management and corporate governance giant.

Why are indices, ETFs, software, pieces of giant investment banks, and corporate governance rolled into one? Risk management is the biggest deal today. Yet investment managers must produce returns for clients. A white paper called The Perils of Parity from MSCI stuffed with terms like “empirical plausibility” and “derived conditions” explains that institutions have moved from allocating capital to allocating risk, and in so doing, leverage has become “necessary to achieve the expected return required by institutional investors.”

Suppose you met with investors and told them your growth story. But as you talked, the investors were thinking about how to allocate risk to you, not how to get a return from investing in your stock. That’s what software is doing today, and what these indices and ETFs are designed to do. So a bad jobs report last week in context of allocated risk was ugly for equities because the risk was allocated to stocks. This week, the risk is allocated somewhere else, and the capital gets allocated to equities. And the outcome is reversed.

Bottom line, you must pay attention to rebalances, IR folks, if only so you can talk briefly to the CFO about the difference between allocated risk and allocated capital. Next up on June 18, smack in the middle of options expirations, are the quarterly rebalances for the S&P 500, the Midcap 400, and the Smallcap 600. All of which have mirrored ETFs. And who knows where the risk and capital are allocated.

Maybe we need more swimming pools filled with inflated see-through beach balls ferrying flexible young females through happy partiers. It would make at least as much sense.