Bloomberg's Tom Maloney recently shed some light on Jane Street's jaw-dropping revenue figure for the 12 months ending March 2021. Here, Alphacution circles back to provide a kaleidoscopic view of what that success looks like from a trading strategy perspective...
Alphacution expands upon an outstanding analysis by BestEx Research on PFOF with additional context on price improvement by leading wholesale market makers.
There are many ways to rank prop firms and market makers, given the right data. However, depending on the market or the metric used, rankings will differ. Outside of our case studies, here are some figures we've never shared on the Feed, and the implications are likely to be quite consequential for the road ahead...
"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."Ernest Hemingway Tuesday, April 6, 2021 was a good day for Alphacution in the press... The morning started with a feature by Bloomberg Editor Tom Maloney, "Citadel Gets the Spotlight," wherein he tells the story of Ken Griffin and Citadel Securities' rise as major trading force in the post GFC landscape and - most notably since GameStop - as a recent focal point of politicians and regulators. (I'm sure Ken is not thrilled with the title image.) Here at Alphacution, this article will be remembered primarily for two things: First, for providing a few useful financial tidbits - and, second, for placing a few of our words in the largest font in our history to date - Should it have been "Amazonization" or "Amazonification"? Either way, you get the gist... One more thing on this: I may have told this tale before, but after throwing an unsolicited sharp elbow in Tom's direction in our December [...]
Alphacution adds to its library of evidence that retail brokerage platforms specifically decide how, when, and if to influence the trading behavior of their clients...
Alphacution provides numbers, pictures and rationale for "price improvement" - in the context of captive retail order flow - having an indelible function that is different than what you have been told by those who traffic in it...
Leveraging numbers and narrative, Alphacution builds a higher-dimension analysis of market structure mechanics on top of Bloomberg Opinion's Matt Levine's recent manifesto on payment for order flow (PFOF). Disclaimer: No unsolicited elbows were thrown during the creation of this Feed post...
This is the fuel that ignites the chaos. Without it, the New Market Kamikazes run into the friction that keeps the rubber on the road...
"You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by avoiding it today."Abraham Lincoln With protestors storming the U.S. Capital - some of which breaching the outer doors and freely strolling the U.S. Senate floor - as surreal and unprecedented backdrop, I sit down to organize a sketch of Alphacution's outlook for the year ahead, starting with a very wide lens: The U.S. economy - much like the rest of the other "developed world" economies - is naturally weaker than the meticulously curated employment and productivity numbers suggest. Technology adoption (from workflow automation to social media distraction), growing debt burdens, ossified resource allocation practices, cross-region labor arbitrage, deteriorating infrastructure, and other factors all converge to deteriorate "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" for a growing portion of the population. The COVID pandemic of 2020 - and however long it remains disruptive throughout 2021 as vaccines are being rolled out - acts as an accelerant of many of these factors. Ours is a deteriorating version of capitalism. Symptoms emblematic of the stage [...]
"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever." Steve Jobs I was going to start out by saying that it's been a pivotal year for Alphacution. Problem is, I said the same things at this time last year. So, I supposed that means it's been a good coupla years. The pandemic, volatility, subsequent lockdown - and some luck in timing - drove a lot of attention towards Alphacution's content in 2020. Clearly, Robinhood and payments for order flow (PFOF) were top themes for the year. Our Feed post on Robinhood and trailing stop orders led the year in page views, and represented like no other before it what it looks like when a story goes viral. Not to be outdone, the timely post on the downfall of Ronin Capital also attracted a ton of attention. In fact, if [...]
