Last week, the Financial Times was first to report that BlackRock, the largest overall asset manager in the world (at ~$11.5 trillion), was in early talks to buy a minority stake in Izzy Englander's Millennium Management, one of the largest hedge funds in the world (at ~$67.9 billion). Though there is no way of knowing the outcome of this news at this time, Alphacution presents its analysis of the potential meaning and impacts of this partnership...
One of the more fascinating discoveries made in Alphacution's recently published case studies on US Equity Option Market Makers comes to us from Wolverine Trading...
With a suite of 14 new charts, Alphacution presents an updated review of and key highlights for retail equity option trading - including overall market share, market share by broker, and market share by wholesale market maker - updated through June 2024...
Alphacution expands on the introduction of its Strategy Factor Library with a deeper dive into its method for estimating the potential universe of short stock and short ETF securities as a component of the core trading strategy for a large group of option market makers...
Alphacution goes wider and deeper than ever before - as part of the research for our unexpectedly exhaustive case study on US equity option markets and option market makers - to compare trading entities based on at least 84 strategy factors from the simplest factors - like securities universe or number of positions by product class - to some of the most sophisticated comparisons that Alphacution has ever attempted. In this Feed post, we publish this list - the first version of our Strategy Factor Library - as well as a ranking of 19 option market making entities by our "shorts universe" factor...
Alphacution begins to present its unique - and visually quantitative - perspective on the extreme level of concentration in the US equity derivatives market...
As of December 2023, there were ~7,200 asset managers who filed 13F reports. In collaboration with its development affiliates, Alphacution publishes its first exhibit to illustrate a ranking of this global asset manager universe by the value of their US equity holdings. To commemorate this development - and refresh those who may be new to Alphacution - we include a brief summary of key research milestones that led to this 'leveling up'...
In this Feed post, Alphacution updates an analysis of Susquehanna Securities - the primary risk-warehousing affiliate of legendary options powerhouse, Susquehanna International Group (SIG) and the place where the largest piece of SIG's global market making operation resides - originally published in Dec 2020. Now, more than 3 years later, Alphacution adds significant new color to that analysis - including 12 charts - and sets the stage for a much more nuanced understanding of the broader group of option market makers...
Alphacution continues to expose breakthroughs from the development of its proprietary version of the 13F dataset. Our example comes from pioneer statistical arbitrage group D. E. Shaw & Co., Inc...
For wholesale market makers in US equities there appears to be a relationship between Rule 605 data and net trading income from retail order flow. For Virtu Financial, a public company and the closest example to a "pure play" in US equity wholesaling, this relationship could have been estimated before the Q3 2023 earnings release date. In this Feed post, Alphacution shares its analysis for this finding - and why it's not the most important component of this discovery...
