Paul

“Generations of human beings were transformed into machines in the relentless pursuit of material wealth: We lived to work.”  - Jeremy Rifkin, The Third Industrial Revolution Founded in 1988 by former Columbia University computer science professor, David Shaw, above a bookstore in New York's Union Square, The DE Shaw Group is now reported to manage over $50 billion in assets. LCH Investments ranks it as the fourth-highest grossing hedge fund group of all time; among the ranks of the likes of Soros, Bridgewater, and Citadel. It is for reasons like these - and many others - that we have been eager to add comprehensive modeling of the available regulatory data for the main reporting entity, D. E. Shaw & Co., Inc., to our expanding library, and moreover, to our evolving understanding of the global market ecosystem. And, like most - maybe all - of the legendary players, this one is worthy of a deeper case study. We will get there in time. For now, the following are a few highlights [...]

"I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed." - John Cusack as Lloyd Dobler, "Say Anything" Few others have captured our attention here at Alphacution like Deutsche Bank (DB). This phenomenon comes as a result of the collision of two facts: 1) a bulge bracket bank in an ongoing state of radical transformation which 2) has simultaneously provided a consistent level of financial and operational transparency to fuel one of Alphacution's most detailed and illuminating sell-side models. This model - along with our vision of the evolving landscape - has supported the production of a series of content along two inter-related themes: technical infrastructure outsourcing and the strategic communications around headcount shrinkage. Links to each of our DB articles can be found below, and now that some of our predictions are mostly in the rearview mirror, they may prove a more interesting read today than when they [...]

"My favorite things in life don't cost any money. It's really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time." - Steve Jobs If you happen to be reading this note while occupying a seat at a firm like Wolverine Trading or Peak6 or D. E. Shaw or AQR or any number of other mythological market creatures that we have yet to model, please don't fret. We will get to you soon enough... For now, we are going to leverage some recent modeling on Simplex Trading - a name not as well known (yet) as some of the others - to reinforce our plot (just in case some of you have lost sight of it in all of the numbers, vernacular, and other perceived complexities) and try to teach you something new about the market ecosystem we are all playing in or otherwise indirectly tethered to. The plot here is reminiscent of the DaVinci quote we use with extreme redundancy for effect: "Learn how to see. Realize that everything [...]

“Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another.” - Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum It is always fascinating to experience the fleeting juxtaposition of data and mythology. Before, there is only mythology, where almost anything is possible. And then, data enters the picture and for a brief moment they coexist until mythology dissipates and is forever changed. Students of this game are often aware of the lists of notable proprietary trading firms and other secretive trading entities, but there is rarely, if ever, any basis upon which to rank them other than the superlatives that tend to be associated with their founders and perhaps a guesstimate of headcount swagged from LinkedIn. Anyway, we just had such an experience with the development of a new model on Hudson River Trading (HRT), a noted highly-automated trading shop. In the absence of data - and pictures formed by data - we really only had mythology to go by. Now we have less mythology... So, let's add a few more pieces to solve our puzzle [...]

"Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." - Steve Jobs In the lead up to the publication of our next case study on legendary derivatives trading powerhouse Susquehanna International Group (SIG), I wanted to provide context on how the proverbial sausage is actually made: Maybe it is true of most firms across most industries, but what we have found in the trading business is that companies tend to become more complex as they mature, particularly if they have enjoyed outsized success. Whether incubated internally or bolted on from the outside, the portfolio of legal entities tends to expand - although not always in linear fashion - as these firms grow and diversify their strategy mix (which in many cases is accompanied with a parallel expansion of legal entities). And, while we expect to discover new levels of complexity when we get to the point of modeling some of the sell-side entities most relevant to the global markets ecosystem - with Goldman [...]

"When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it." - Henry Ford Please forgive me for trying to squeeze just one more reference to HBO's hit series out of the tube, but it turns out that "GoT" is not the only G.O.T. In our current mission to focus on those notable players who thrive in closest proximity to the sources of market liquidity (in order to quantify their impact on the broader asset management ecosystem), we finally found time to explore and model the other G.O.T - Group One Trading, LP (GOT). Now, for those of you who are just joining the thread, you might consider starting with our piece on the Top 100 Players in US Listed Market Structure where we place GOT as a member - and for the exceedingly ambitious, you might rewind further to our study, The Context Machine: Estimating Asset Manager Technology Spending, which ultimately supports the hypothesis that defines our ecosystem mapping framework that has [...]

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 [...]