Monthly Archives: May 2019

If you're not failing, then you're not pushing your limits, and if you're not pushing your limits then you're not maximizing you're potential." - Ray Dalio When we first exposed our initial thoughts on this legendary hedge fund manager in Bridgewater Associates: Modeling Ray Dalio's Modeling, the key finding was that their investment strategy was impersonating that of a macro manager (which historically relied largely on futures) by using ETFs to shoulder the primary market factors. In the chart below, Alphacution presents an illustration of the portion of 13F market value represented by a very short list of ETFs: Now, having expanded our modeling template (over several other trading firms) to include more analytics - and with the benefit of a couple more 13F reports to update our existing Bridgewater model, there are more key findings to share: First, the market value of 13F securities reached an all-time high for the 54-quarter period beginning Q4 2005 and ending Q1 2019. This should come as no surprise given widespread media accounts [...]

"If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?" - Albert Einstein For this one we need to go all the way back to the first time we illustrated the fact that KCG's market making operation - the artist fka GETCO (or, Octeg for the uber-insiders) - was more sensitive to volatility than Virtu's market making operation, as illustrated below: Now, I know we've spent an inordinate amount of time on these names and related topics, but I'm going to beg your indulgence on this one because the findings are uniquely cool - and I'll keep it fairly short: Specific sensitivities to volatility by different trading platforms notwithstanding, the condition that yields the greatest potential for outperformance of these market making strategies tends to occur when realized volatility exceeds implied volatility. It turns out that since these strategies are actually not set up to predict volatility very well they are therefore designed to remain in a defensive posture along with the prevailing vol [...]

Picking up where we left off with Fidelity's unprecedented shift in total (13F) position count in late 2018, we turn to another anomaly disclosed by our modeling: In the exhibit below, Alphacution presents its position concentration analysis for the entire 25-year 13F record for Fidelity. Here, we are not only looking at the value of the Top 10 positions as a percentage of all 13F positions, but also the fully-loaded Top 10 positions, which means across all reporting entities. We also look at the largest position as a percentage of total position value and the isolated Google / Alphabet values, since Class A and Class C shares were both in the Top 10 for a while. Anyway, long story short: What does it mean when Fidelity doubles its (13F) positions from roughly 5,500 to 10,100 - which in this case is likely all US stocks positions since there is not likely to be much if any short positions - at the same time that the aggregate value of the Top [...]

"Life's just this game of inches. And, the inches we need are everywhere around us." - Al Pacino If it's any consolation, the original version of this started with a shout-out to Doug with a tribute to Duncan Keith, former defenseman for the 2010 Stanley Cup champion Chicago Blackhawks, who lost 7 puck-stopping chicklets in their series-clinching win of that year's Western Conference run for Lord Stanley's cup. Hockey stud that he was, Duncan returned to finish the game... No, instead, the modeling and charting overpowered even that gem of an opening to give you another timely tribute to our Avengers after last week's ode to Ant-Man and the Wasp... After all, we are committed to hacking your attention with Inception-like layers of metaphors to keep you entertained while serving up the latest morsel of intelligence about the trading and asset management world. Here's the gist for this one: Though it's disclosures about key attributes of  their business are quite good relative to others, Virtu - like any other public [...]

“Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.” ― Leonardo da Vinci While it is true that we spend alot of time and energy of late exploring certain deep-in-the-weeds aspects of the trading world, if you think that we are only interested in providing intelligence about that neck of the woods then you may have lost the plot here. What is going on deep in those weeds has impacts on what appears to be the wide open spaces (where many traditional and less automated strategy managers operate). But, it also turns out, the traditional segment of the ecosystem has an impact on the cutting-edged segment, too. It's all a feedback loop - and this teaser is intended to provide a taste of ballast for the players that operate in that different, more traditional, region of our asset management ecosystem map. Fidelity is one of the largest asset managers in the world based on a long track record of success. From the vantage point of their 13F filings - [...]

“I can do this all day.” —Steve Rogers In honor of the big Avengers Endgame opening last week, I thought to pay a little tribute to Ant Man and the Wasp for this one... Like many of the trading firms we have been focusing on recently, Tower Research Capital (TRC) has a market making unit - Latour Trading - and a proprietary trading unit - Tower Research Capital Investments (TRCI), both of which are based on high-performance technologies, quantitative methods and extreme levels of workflow automation. (BTW, if you read the Citadel Securities case study summary then you might already be hip to what we are calling a nested alpha architecture. If not, no worries. We will be highly redundant about it.) Perhaps because we have been focused on some of the biggest market makers, prop firms and hedge funds in and around our structural alpha zone - plus knowing that TRC boasts a global headcount of roughly 900 folks - we were expecting to find something else in their [...]