Daily Average Fugazi’s: Robinhood Postures for IPO
“Name of the game? Move the money from your client’s pocket into your pocket. Number one rule of Wall Street: Nobody knows if the stock is going up, down, sideways or in … circles. It’s all a fugazi…“ – Mr. Hanna, Wolf of Wall Street On Monday, August 10 at exactly 11am EDT (you know, after the opening bell was safely in the rearview mirror), Robinhood Markets, Inc. – the anti-incumbency insurgent trading app platform and self-proclaimed democratizer of all things financial – [...]
Alphacution Joins the eXponential Finance Podcast – S2E1
Alphacution Director of Research, Paul Rowady, joins eXponential Finance Podcast host and Tokyo FinTech founder, Norbert Gehrke, for a spirited – if not, highly-caffeinated – and entertaining discussion covering a wide range of Alphacution’s most illuminating research themes, from the genesis of its trading and asset management ecosystem map to the concept of alpha capacity to the implications of the current commission-free trading landscape and, of course, the riveting Robinhood phenomenon. Enjoy…
Alphacution Press: The Hill on Robinhood
“The rush of armchair traders investing through Robinhood, an easy-to-use app for trading stocks, may be helping inflate a stock bubble and setting up investors for a potential bust.” – by TheHill.com Reporter Niv Elis Alphacution contributes to TheHill.com’s development of story on Robinhood, “Are trading apps propping up markets?” (August 6, 2020).
Q2 PFOF Craziness: Robinhood Becomes Parody of E*Trade Commercial, Competes with TikTok for Attention…
“There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.” – Ludwig von Mises, economist Someday, sufficiently far into the future, when we have somehow broken free of the illusion, we are going to look back on this [...]
The Evolving Value of 13F Reporting: Building a Macro-Structure Cockpit
“The Initial Mystery that attends any journey is: how did the traveler reach his starting point in the first place?” - Louise Bogan, poet and author After 40 years, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced on July 10, 2020 that it had proposed to amend Form 13F to update the reporting threshold for institutional investment managers and make other targeted changes. The proposal would "raise the reporting threshold to $3.5 billion, reflecting proportionally the same market value [...]
TD Ameritrade’s Q2 Update: To Infinity or Oblivion?
"Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in." - Michael Corleone, The Godfather: Part III Chicken or egg? For today's story, we know which one came first. However, we may never know for sure which one was the more prominent cause of the recent sustained spike in US stock volumes: A frictionless environment brought on by a zero-commission framework or a high-volatility market brought on by a once-in-a-century global pandemic? Granted, there may [...]
Alphacution Press: Financial Times and Day Trading
“You’d never believe how hard it is to find a wetsuit in Boston.” – Dave “Davey Day Trader” Portnoy Alphacution quoted in Financial Times story on day trading, “Day trading: no complaints from Portnoy” (June 17, 2020).
Alphacution Press: Bloomberg on Robinhood
“Robinhood’s users have been mocked endlessly for their inexperience and even blamed for a stock market many view as out of touch with reality.” – by Bloomberg Opinion Columnist, Nir Kaissar Alphacution contributes to Bloomberg Opinion’s development of story on Robinhood, “Robinhood Is Democratizing Markets, Not Disrupting Them” (July 17, 2020).
Robinhood’s Trailing Stop Orders: Extreme Profitability, By Design
"They make it so easy." - Richard Dobatse, Robinhood user (via New York Times) "A fool and his money are soon parted." - Thomas Tusser, poet Imagine if you knew, ahead of time, exactly what bait to use? Not only which bait to attract and influence the behavior of specific customers, but how to package the output of those behaviors - into an additional form of bait - in such a way as to leverage US listed [...]
From Citadel Securities to Tastyworks: The New Economics of Liquidity, Part 1
"The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." - Marcel Proust The data contained in the revised SEC Rule 606 reporting has landed like a transparency bomb for those few of us who try to make sense of complex - and historically opaque - market structure issues; perhaps even more so for those fewer of us that are able to triangulate on the strategic movements of the various players by weaving [...]
