Robinhood: Q3 Order Routing Revenue Continues to Break Records
"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."Ralph Waldo Emerson The juggernaut that is the Robinhood commission-free trading app has accumulated some dents and bruises over the year, along with a number of truly breathtaking successes. One of the more overexposed stories in a year engorged with superlatives, system outages, a customer suicide and, most recently, the hacking of thousands of accounts has challenged Robinhood's meteoric rise [...]
Citadel Securities Picks Fight With SEC Over Crystal Ball
"If you are not paying for the product, then you are the product."The Social Dilemma In a rare display of miscalculation, Citadel may have overplayed its hand... Here's the setup: According to Bloomberg, "Citadel Securities LLC has sued the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over the regulator’s approval of an order type introduced by stock-exchange operator IEX Group Inc." Approved by the SEC in August and launched on October 1, IEX's discretionary limit order type - or, "D-Limit" [...]
Options Powerhouse IMC Financial Markets: Stung by Pandemic Volatility?
“The best way to differentiate the good from the bad is to look at economic incentives. Companies that sell you a physical product or a subscription are far less likely to abuse your trust than a company with a free product that depends on monopolizing your attention.Robert McNamee, Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe Amsterdam-based International Marketmakers Combination BV - more commonly known simply as IMC - is one of the most legendary proprietary option trading powerhouses [...]
All About the Flow: Tower Research Capital Launches “SDP Latour”
"If you can't beat them, arrange to have them beaten."George Carlin A silver lining of living in a suspended state of lock down is that there is a lot of good content to fill the daily spaces that need to be filled. And, now that Bluetooth earbuds allow us to basically live with these digital appendages in our ears all the time, I have been devouring an expanding library of podcasts lately. (Participating in some, as well). Of [...]
Simplex Trading: Against the Odds
“When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.”Henry Ford On occasion, we have framed the world's leading proprietary trading firms with the following graphic: And, as many of you know, this is the terrain upon which we have focused a notable component of our attention to date - and likely where we will place a disproportionate share of our attention going forward. This is partly due [...]
Alphacution Adopts Subscription Model
It's been a long time coming... And now, after a few years of digging for data, modeling that data, creating pictures of that modeling, publishing snippets of insight around those pictures, growing our network to the point where several thousand of you are regular consumers of our output, and ultimately earning enterprise subscriptions and other engagements from many of the top trading firms in the world and other key ecosystem stakeholders, Alphacution is formally moving to a subscription model.
Wholesale Market Makers: Adding Price Improvement to the PFOF Analysis
"The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones." John Maynard Keynes Just because the rule requires “market centers that trade National Market System (NMS) securities to make available standardized, monthly reports containing statistical information about covered order executions that are free and readily accessible to the public" does not mean that that information is lounging around under a bank of Klieg lights in an easily consumable format. Like a [...]
Alphacution Joins First Episode of DTCC’s “Advancing Financial Markets. Together.” Podcast
"My wife says, 'If you've got time to lean, you've got time to clean.' So, if I'm exhibiting any sloth-like behavior, she puts a rake or a broom in my hand pretty fast..." - Tim Lind, Managing Director, DTCC Data Services For the first episode in its podcast series, "Advancing Financial Markets. Together." Alphacution's Director of Research, Paul Rowady joins the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation's (DTCC) Managing Director, Data Services, Tim Lind and Executive Director, Marketing [...]
Alphacution Press: Wall Street Journal on Susquehanna, ByteDance, TikTok
“No matter the outcome of the struggle between China and the U.S. over video-sharing app TikTok, an unlikely winner will be a secretive trading firm based outside of Philadelphia.” – by Wall Street Journal reporters Rolfe Winkler, Jing Yang and Alexander Osipovich. Alphacution contributes analysis to Wall Street Journal story on legendary option-trading powerhouse, Susquehanna International Group’s ownership interest in ByteDance, the Beijing-based owner of video-sharing social media app, TikTok, “Secretive High-Speed Trading Firm Hits Jackpot With TikTok” (October 1, 2020). [...]
The Fourth Exchange
“Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.” – Sophocles With a geyser of attention-snatching news as our normal daily backdrop, one could easily be forgiven for missing a signal from a collection of recent market structure clues. Individually, most of these have been on the radar of those that follow capital markets closely. And then there are others that are much deeper down in the weeds. Taken together, however, they paint of picture of increasing levels [...]
