For Subscribers

Approaching Peak Proprietary

Alphacution presents evidence for how dominant prop firms are starving smaller competitors out of business - a sign that we may be approaching some kind of peak. One of the highlights of this post is a rare, long-term chart of the rise of the top proprietary traders - including Citadel Securities, Jane Street Group, and Susquehanna International Group (SIG) - and the decline of banks in the US equity option market...

By |2025-09-30T01:53:15-04:00September 26th, 2025|For Subscribers|

Optiver’s Charm Offensive – Part I (Updated)

Bloomberg's recent exposé on legendary Amsterdam-based derivatives trader, Optiver, is heavy on gloss and sabre rattling - against market leaders like Citadel Securities, Jane Street, and Susquehanna International Group - and light on strategic and competitive analysis. In Part I of this Feed post, Alphacution begins to fill that gap with data, context, and perspective...

By |2025-09-04T18:07:45-04:00September 2nd, 2025|For Subscribers|

Case Study: The Temple of Financial Fantasy

In this 118-page, 145-exhibit case study – “US Equity Market Macrostructure Evolution: The Temple of Financial Fantasy” – Alphacution presents its case for how the adoption of technology by a subset of leading proprietary trading firms have leveraged the regulatory framework over the past 20 years to permanently alter and distort the US equity market to the point of a farcical rivalry between two separate and distinct “stock markets” that are animated by two competing realities. The first reality is represented by a mob of self-directed retail traders with a lot of time and very few assets, and the second reality is represented by an increasingly complacent institutional asset management industry with nearly all the assets. Today, institutional asset managers are trapped by their own complacency – and the clock is ticking… To tell this incredible story, Alphacution will present its updated framework, new modeling, and never-seen-before measurements for the evolving symbiosis between risk managers, risk strategies, and asset flows within the US equity market ecosystem over a span of the past 12 years, beginning late 2013…

By |2025-07-10T13:49:44-04:00July 9th, 2025|For Subscribers|

The Model US Equity Portfolio?

In Alphacution's upcoming case study, "US Equity Market Macrostructure Evolution: The Temple of Financial Fantasies," we expose patterns discovered by modeling the entire 13F dataset over a period of nearly 12 years. It turns out that there are significant concentrations of reporting managers at the intersection of certain metrics that we've mined from that dataset. This suggests that there are significant concentrations of similar strategies. Alphacution presents a teaser for its findings...

By |2025-06-26T22:53:52-04:00June 25th, 2025|For Subscribers|

Baghdad Bessent And The New Capital War (Updated)

Alphacution continues its analysis of US equity liquidity factors contextualized against the backdrop of foreign holdings of US securities - which is further contextualized against the backdrop of the composition and expected growth of the US national debt - and all of which is set against the backdrop of the "Trump Trade War." Meanwhile, as the key financial spokesman for the Trump administration, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appears to have consciously adopted one of recent history's most colorful roles; that of "Baghdad Bob."

By |2025-06-13T11:22:18-04:00May 8th, 2025|For Subscribers|