IMC Financial Markets: You Win Some, You Lose Some
Options powerhouse IMC Financial Markets scores some recent wins and, apparently, some losses, too. Alphacution shares its evidence...
Alphacution Publishes Payment For Order Flow 2020 – Part II: Broker Personas
In Part I of Alphacution’s case study on payment for order flow (PFOF), we focused mainly on the rates paid by wholesale market makers to retail brokers under a full range of securities categories and order type scenarios. In this 22-page, 20-exhibit deck, Alphacution presents PART II of its upcoming comprehensive case study, The Robinhood Effect, with a focus on a concept called broker personas. Alphacution’s working hypothesis on this topic is that each retail broker – in fact, all order flow intermediaries – have a unique persona. This persona – a unique pattern formed by order type distributions – is a distillation of client trading behaviors. In this presentation, Alphacution demonstrates that broker personas are partly due to investor demographics and, more interestingly, partly due to broker influence. Furthermore, when we broaden our perspective to consider that retail brokers are now compensated for trade flows largely by their wholesaler counterparts, we see a clearer picture of how desired outcomes could be manufactured…
Alphacution Press: CBS News on Robinhood’s Q1 2021 Order Routing Revenue
Stephen Gandel, a contributor to CBS News and Moneywatch, published "Robinhood raked in at least $110 million from 'meme stock' rally" on May 7, 2021, in part based on Alphacution's analysis of Robinhood's Q1 2021 order routing revenue.
XTX Enters The Dark
Expanding its footprint in US equities, XTX Markets drops its first 605 report for March 2021. Alphacution uses this event to make some comparisons and offer some interpretations about the evolving US equity market structure...
Robinhood Q1 PFOF Report: Big Growth, Dramatic Shifts in Trading Behavior
Robinhood's Q1 2021 PFOF data was made public over the weekend. Here are a few highlights...
It’s 13F Season Again. Simplex Trading Goes First
In a world of ultra-fierce competition among proprietary traders, it has become increasingly challenging for newer, smaller players to succeed. We have been keeping a close eye on two players who appear to be bucking this trend above the rest. One of them is option market maker, Simplex Trading. In this Feed post, Alphacution showcases the latest 13F reporting to test for signals of Simplex's ongoing success...
Alphacution Publishes Payment For Order Flow 2020, Part I: Rate Heatmaps
2020 will be remembered for many reasons. In the context of Alphacution’s ongoing research focus, we want to remember 2020 as the first full year of enhanced transparency into the mechanics and impacts of the long-held practice of payment for order flow (PFOF). In this 23-page, 20-exhibit deck, Alphacution presents PART I of its upcoming comprehensive case study, Payment For Order Flow 2020, with a focus on order routing rate heatmaps.
The Mother of All 2020 PFOF Charts
Assembling 4 quarterly reports comprised of 12 monthly sets of figures segmented by 3 securities categories and 4 order types across 12 retail brokerage entities and a subset of some 14 wholesale market makers - each number within which, by the way, painstakingly entered by hand - in order to slice and dice an entire annualized data set from any angle and still have everything add up exactly the same was both a pain in the ass and a labor of love...
Coinbase IPO Sheds Light on Crypto’s Structural Revenue Potential
Based on data reported in concert with the historic IPO of U.S. crytpocurrency exchange, Coinbase, Alphacution takes a first look at the pile of cabbage that's really at stake in the explosive, yet still nascent, cryptocurrency market. (Turns out, it seems insane...)
And the #1 Market Maker is…
There are many ways to rank prop firms and market makers, given the right data. However, depending on the market or the metric used, rankings will differ. Outside of our case studies, here are some figures we've never shared on the Feed, and the implications are likely to be quite consequential for the road ahead...
