Open

"Don’t get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is not a clear one.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein As we build - and promote - our case to elevate Alphacution's value proposition and research output to a more viable economic support model, we are beginning to focus on the development of deeper and more comprehensive premium content.  This plan has been outlined in our recent Support the Feed! post, a portion of which will now be appended to the bottom of each new post going forward. BTW, the sooner you respond to that plea in some way, the less likely it will be that I become increasingly obnoxious about the topic... ;-) Anyway, I had hoped to develop this case study on Spot Trading - a noted Chicago-based proprietary option-focused trading firm that closed at the end of 2017 - as an example of what we are able to highlight specifically in cases where [...]

"Are you not entertained?! Are you not entertained?!!  Is this not why you are here?!!" - Maximus Decimus Meridius (Russell Crowe) Executive Summary The chart that follows represents the content to be covered in this post, and foreshadows a core focus of Alphacution's research calendar for the weeks and months ahead... Furthermore, at the end this post, I am also going to ask you to support this work (in exchange for certain content benefits), like this: (INLINE SUBSCRIPTION FUNCTIONALITY DISABLED.) Individual Subscription Options Annual Subscription : $275.00 USD - yearly Monthly Subscription : $25.00 USD - monthly Note: Business credit cards and bank accounts can be used via our PayPal payment portal. So, with that in mind, you can opt to bounce right now... Or, support right now... Or, learn a bit about our opening chart, see what it means and how it relates to what we have coming up in the research calendar, and then make your support decisions... It's your call. My job is this: Have I captured your [...]

"Tug on anything at all and you'll find it connected to everything else in the Universe..." - John Muir One of our favorite trends to track around here is the pace of change in workflow automation for trading and investment management processes. It is likely the one monumental driver of change that few are paying attention to (as a measure of success) - and even fewer are developing methods to quantify... So, several months ago, when FINRA (the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) published its very first "industry snapshot" - the eponymous 2018 FINRA Industry Snapshot - we decided to see if we could use it to enhance any of the components of the broader financial ecosystem that we had previously modeled. After all, Alphacution's initial asset manager study (April 2018) had already highlighted a very healthy 7.3% 11-year CAGR in assets under management growth since 2005 for the sample of 60 large managers in that study (see below)… ... and, we had already made some fairly clear rumblings prior to [...]

The purpose of the Open Access libraries, and the solicitation to register for access to that library, was to openly share certain research output as examples of what could be found in the Premium Access Library, and to assess levels of interest in various themes. The Open Access libraries originally contained traditionally-formatted reports (i.e. - PDF documents) and various exhibits (i.e. - Powerpoint slides). The Open Exhibit Library was an assembly of all the exhibits that had been published in the various Feed posts. For technical and administrative reasons, Alphacution has temporarily discontinued updates to these libraries until such time as the functionality and security of the various site components can be enhanced for ease of maintenance and navigation. For those of you who have registered to access these components of Alphacution's research archive via our original login functionality, we have assembled those documents that were made available for download as follows. For the foreseeable future, additional document downloads will be found in specific Feed posts: 1) Executive Summary: The [...]

“Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses — especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.” — Leonardo Da Vinci 2018 was a truly fascinating one here at Alphacution, thanks to you... A little over three years into this project - and a ton of diverse, experimental research on the impacts of technology within the global financial services ecosystem - and, in many ways, we have only just begun to hit our stride. This is mainly because of something you and me now have in common: It seems that I have finally figured out how to strike the chords that you want to hear... In 2018, our newsletter grew to be distributed to nearly 20,000 capital markets executives; mainly including those stakeholders related to the most advanced trading strategies and trading operations in the world. For each of the last 15 newsletters, average distribution was ~16,400 and average opens were ~5,500 (or, over 33%). This audience includes most of the founders, CEOs, senior executives [...]

“Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses — especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.” — Leonardo Da Vinci Da Vinci is now known to have been able to "see things" that he had the tools to make real in the period, and see some that he couldn't. For those visions he couldn't bring into reality, that disconnect - I have concluded - was mainly a function of the underlying pace of innovation. Da Vinci simply would not live long enough for the pace of certain innovations to intersect with his lifespan. Today, the pace of innovation is so severe, it's difficult to imagine what might not intersect with our own lifespans. Food for thought...  

Jensen Huang, CEO, Nvidia: "Software is eating the world, but AI is going to eat software..." One of the most fascinating aspects of innovation is its resistance to scaling. At least this is one observer's interpretation. Those trying to innovate at increasing scale - like, inside a large enterprise - might prefer to describe it as frustrating, to say the least. The rabid interest in startups - small groups of visionaries and entrepreneurs that are able to deliver radical levels of change to the provision of solutions for unmet market needs - is a reaction to this resistance. During the post-global financial crisis (GFC) hangover, it became vogue for large banks to establish externalized "innovation laboratories" to protect relevant and critical innovations from the harsh bureaucracies and incumbent politics inherent to large enterprises. Best case, they keep the proximity of innovation close; worst case, the messaging serves as a marketing tool. Of course, #fintech innovation has been a raging hotbed of innovation for the past few years, and many expect [...]