A note on trading today: The dollar dropped out of the gate this morning, buoying stocks. Talk about soft dollars. The price of shares is a construct of the Fed at present.

Anyway, after sharing the Hyatt in downtown Seattle with the Kansas City Chiefs (convincing victors Sunday), we returned to Denver Monday, body-scanned once but otherwise briskly processed through airport security. So we’re a day late with The Map.

Speaking of body scans, the SEC’s current insider-trading probe is poking at the squishy Wall Street practice of rebating trading costs with “soft dollars.” We should know about soft dollars in the IR profession. Chances are, the last sizeable institutional position taken in your stock involved them. Continue reading →

Here in Spokane, the landscape is bleak and wintry, the temperature hovering at ten above. Crisp! Before we gather round our well-laid tables (in America at least) Thursday and give thanks, let’s weigh on the scales of investor-relations justice this insider-trading scandal soaking print ink.

The allegation, if you missed the story of the week outside South Korea, Ireland and Cambodia, is that funds are using “channel check” style information to gain an illegal advantage. Federal agents have swept into capital-markets concerns to seize files and persons and stop this pusillanimous peculation.

The last time government contended information misuse, machines took over the trading markets. Continue reading →

Blaise Pascal, the 17th century French brainiac, is reputed once to have said in a post script: “I’d have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have time.”

We wonder what Pascal would think of the 523-page Final Rule for Regulation National Market System (Reg NMS), published August 29, 2005. Step forward a half-decade, and it explains why deep and liquid markets that were thought to foster the interests of long-term investors have instead fed a fragmented maker/taker market system florid with high-frequency traders moving the same shares from place to place. Continue reading →

In Denver, summer’s retreat this year toward the Continental Divide has been languid, its ambling trail marked by fiery aspens and long warm days.

But in the markets, pension funds have given stocks the cold shoulder, and fast. So says an article in the Wall Street Journal Monday, which traced the defection at noteworthy major corporate plans. Stocks comprise but half of plan assets now at best, and pensions themselves are in rapid decline as companies shift from defined benefits. Continue reading →

Boy, when it rains, it pours. Three years ago when we began grousing about how Reg NMS was turning equity trading into a foot race, people thought we’d been hitting the Hookah. Now it’s on 60 Minutes.

Along with Larry Leibowitz from the NYSE and Minoj Narang of Tradeworx, 60 Minutes interviewed Joe Saluzzi from Themis Trading (read their white papers about trading). Joe was on my panel about modern trading at NIRI National in 2009. Few people are better at explaining the peccadilloes of a market structure based on price and speed.

Here again is the problem, simplified to its most basic elements: Trades must meet at the best bid or offer. The participants able to get to the price fastest will always set the price. And because the exchanges and regulators alike have embraced a “maker/taker” model in place of the old auction and automated quotation systems, transient money is always setting your price. Yes, it requires the presence of something else underneath it, as the Flash Crash illustrated. But the structure, not the behavior, is the problem. The behavior is precisely what one would expect from the existing structure. Continue reading →