Paul

"Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your inner voice." - Steve Jobs "There is no real substitute for common sense - except for good luck, which is a great substitute for everything." - James Harris Simons It was the late 90's, a time when the moniker of "Godfather of the Quants" may have still been open for debate. Edward Thorpe, of Princeton / Newport Partners and among the first mathematicians to study patterns in financial markets, was still active. And, the protagonists for the fascinating tale about beating a Vegas roulette wheel with custom made computers embedded in their shoes (and told in the book, the Eudaemonic Pie), Doyne Farmer and Norman Packard, were still active at the Prediction Company, a unit of UBS O'Connor (which, BTW, was later sold to Millennium in 2013 and ultimately shut down in 2018 with a 27-year stat arb strategy track record including only one down year). And yet, today, the legacy that seems to remain the strongest is that of [...]

The latest figures on order routing revenue are easy to find. With the exception of Robinhood Financial - the new, no commission, retail-focused trading app for stocks and cryptocurrencies - order routing revenue is clearly disclosed by the incumbent trading platforms; namely, TD Ameritrade, Schwab, E*Trade and to a lesser extent, Interactive Brokers. However, in any case, something seems to be heating up as aggregate payments for order flow (PFOF) breaks from the range of the previous five years (2013-2017) to grow 42.3% for 2018, see exhibit below: Now, as for identifying the other side of this ledger - those who make the payments for order flow - that continues to be a bit more opaque. We know who should be on that roster because they are also likely to be a subset of our Top 100 Players in US Listed Market Structure ranking. But that doesn't mean the PFOF figures are dangling from easy-to-find places. To the contrary, they are likely comingled with other figures and obfuscated by aggregated [...]

Image Credit: Fabian Oefner "The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." - Marcel Proust “Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.” - Leonardo DaVinci In my mind, memories of the childhood home are dominated by those of vast spaces. A colossal stairway, a living room like a grand ballroom, the front and back yards both like baseball stadiums. My father is there - like a giant sitting at the head of the kitchen table - savoring his freshly unscrolled newspaper. And yet, upon visiting this place as an adult, it presents itself as your basic 3-bedroom layout - barely 2,000 square feet - with postage stamp yards. It turns out, my memories are somehow locked in when I was the size of a toddler. Perhaps, you share the experience of this illusionary twist of perspective... Recently, listed markets have started to mimic this duality of perspective for me. There was a time when the totality of stocks and [...]

Image Credit: John Rowady, Havana, Cuba "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. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life." - Steve Jobs There was a time, years ago, when I had a cigar attached to some part of my body pretty much 24/7. Like a disgustingly satisfying man-binky, if I wasn't smoking it, I was definitely chewing on it - and it didn't matter where I was. Polite company or public spaces did not deter the guile to sneak a chomp on the soggy end of a previously-lit robusto. And then, Cigar Aficionado magazine came along and ruined my enjoyment with the oncoming herd of the impending fad. Now, this is not to suggest that there aren't occasions - usually a golf outing or as an accompaniment to a fine bourbon - that [...]

"There's an old saying: If you want to hide the treasure, put it in plain sight. That way no one will see it." - Larry Dossey It was only a matter of time. Sooner or later, Alphacution would need take its analysis further out on the road. Sure, we recently sent a warm shoutout to the AmsterdamTrader with our article focused on Optiver and IMC, so this would not be the first time we ventured outside our own backyard. However, in this case, our storyline makes a long overdue heading for London, where fans of Alphacution - both high and low - help point out the next collection of raw grains for our growing sand castle of market intelligence... Today's subject is Marshall Wace Asset Management (MWAM), the $39 billion AUM systematic and quantitative hedge fund powerhouse based in London - and we set the stage for much deeper future analysis by presenting the following shape of the full history of net turnover: Note that the missing 2008 (for obvious [...]

Alphacution's Top 100 Players in US Listed Market Structure schematic (v1.0) was a huge hit last week; breaking almost all content engagement records on our various publishing channels to date. Apparently there is a demand for eye candy. Who knew? While we develop some of the specific underlying modeling that supports that vision, this is a quick teaser for how that schematic fits onto our asset management ecosystem map. It only appears complicated. We are working on some simpler illustrations. There is definitely a method to our madness...

"Laughter, tears, and dance moves are all things that should not be kept on the inside." - Denis Morton, Peloton Instructor It is as of the writing of this very short post - mid-afternoon on a lazy Friday - that we've just found that XTX Markets' very first US filing to the SEC database is not yet 24 hours old. We have been scratching our heads about this one for a little while now, wondering if and when we would ever receive any real evidence about this newish entrant to the market making landscape. After all, it does seem to us that a) we don't see many new players surviving in this neck of the jungle - Alphacution's structural alpha zone, and 2) ~100 employees and counting tends to suggest that there is something mildly sustainable going on here. Well, as of 16:17 (eastern time) on February 28, 2019, that evidence finally arrived; the equivalent of a DNA sample - the first X17A5 filing for this unique broker dealer - [...]