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 →

Headline at 2:34 p.m. Eastern Time today: “Fed Pledges Low Rates Through 2013.”

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. Continue reading →

Want to know about dark pools? Join the NIRI Virtual Chapter at noon eastern time Wednesday May 25.

I’m moderating the discussion. The all-star panel includes Nicole Olson of storied dark pool Liquidnet; Adam Sussman of expert market-structure research firm TABB Group; and Joe Saluzzi at Themis Trading, one of today’s leading voices on the nature of trading markets. You know him from Bloomberg, 60 Minutes and CNBC.

Two weeks ago at the NIRI finale for the season here in Denver, we were indulging in the benefits of having brewery Molson Coors in the chapter. And someone was talking to me about “black pools.”

I thought, “IR folks don’t get dark pools yet.”

This afternoon an IR pro in California emailed, asking how to figure out what percentage of their shares trade in dark pools. You can’t know, exactly. Continue reading →

You might think “OTC” stands for “off the charts,” which is how we’d rate both the skiing in Winter Park last week and the 70-degree temperatures in Denver Sunday that allowed me to get a post-skiing tan on the back deck.

Actually, OTC stands for “over the counter.” It describes brokers doing business directly with each other, and it’s a big reason why NYSE Euronext and the Deutsche Bourse (everybody spells it differently) are merging.

Our friend David Weild, former vice-chair at the Nasdaq and current market-structure expert at Grant Thornton said of the impending deal: “Scale, scale, scale.” Duncan Niederauer, expected to lead the combined entity, said today: “This is an industry that lends itself to scale.” It seems that what began here in 1792 under the Buttonwood Tree at the foot of Wall Street is at an end of sorts. Why?

Businesses need scale when markets are commoditized and currencies debased. But beyond that, it’s the result of monumental revitalization of the over-the-counter market. Big brokers are trading with each other, avoiding exchanges. And because they are experts at managing risk, institutions choose them not just for execution but as counterparties for transferring risk from asset class to asset class. This is fast becoming the main reason that natural liquidity – trading lingua franca for shares not driven by high-speed intermediaries – moves around. Continue reading →

Memo on a 70-point swing: Saturday we hiked the red rocks at the Denver Front Range’s Roxborough Park. It was 62 degrees Fahrenheit. This morning it was ten below zero.

Last Friday I was in Dallas (seventy-five degrees warm) for a trading panel discussion at the NIRI Dallas-Fort Worth chapter. Also Friday, the Market Structure Map from last week on artificial liquidity ran courtesy of Joe Saluzzi at the Themis Trading blog, and at Welling@Weeden, Kate Welling’s respected letter at Weeden & Co. (many thanks to both generous hosts). Today against a rocking backdrop of geopolitical unrest, rising global inflation, commodity uncertainty and cold winter weather, US equities are rolling.

Talk about wild temperature swings. Higher prices are nice. We loved them in home values too five years ago. There is no better way to be cool in the IR chair than riding a hot stock. And most times, your executives think your share price is undervalued.

But don’t you wonder, just a teensy bit, how come the prospect of the Suez Canal disappearing into a dark pool isn’t mildly sobering? We had four clients up 5-7% today, five down a little, and the vast bulk up equal or better than the market. Really? Continue reading →