I read this at an Occupy Wall Street site:

“Let me tell you a wonderful old joke from communist times. A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors. So he told his friends: Let’s establish a code. If the letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I said. If it is written in red ink, it is false. After a month his friends get a first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theaters show good films from the West. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.”

Great joke. No doubt scrutinizing your trading data to make sense of it is like something written in red, the code for which is blue.

Speaking of which, chances are, your earnings date is approaching. Your intraday volatility (spreads between high and low prices) is perhaps 4%. Across our client base, it’s now over 4% on average. To help you make sense of your stock price, the exchanges and designated market makers and surveillance firms are giving you columns of data on trading by different brokers and sector or economic news. They tell you so-and-so upgraded the sector, causing a strong rally.

You’re not sure. In your gut you think the euro has got a lot to do with it. Maybe the dollar. It would be nice to know. And it would help if you could assess how money will react to the news you announce next week or the week after. 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 →

Stocks go up and down. Nothing new there.

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. Continue reading →

Scheduling note: I’m in Miami Friday for a panel discussion on trading realities for the NIRI Senior Roundtable. Hope to see you there!

Today is the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. Near the end of WWII, my great uncle, Jack, was one of 316 sailors from 1,200 aboard the USS Indianapolis to survive its sinking and days in shark-ridden waters in the south pacific. Tough fellows, those guys.

On that happy note, let’s turn to everybody’s favorite topic: math. Click here for an example of math in action, a chart showing the spot market for the US dollar, called the DXY, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the past three months. The two juxtapose like the mirror image of a mountain in a still lake on a clear day. Wherever one goes, the other is equally opposite. Continue reading →

What does the word “actionable” mean to you?

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. Continue reading →