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 [...]
Alphacution Press: New York Times and Robinhood
“Its users buy and sell the riskiest financial products and do so more frequently than customers at other retail brokerage firms, but their inexperience can lead to staggering losses.” – by Nathaniel Popper Alphacution contributes to The New York Times’ development of story on Robinhood, “Robinhood Has Lured Young Traders, Sometimes With Devastating Results” (July 8, 2020).
Phenomenon: On This Score, Robinhood Now Exceeds E*Trade, Others
"It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link of the chain of destiny can be handled at a time." - Winston Churchill The holidays, with all of its gift-giving elves, came early this year with new data; data that I have been crunching non-stop for the past week - and will likely continue to crunch in the week ahead. The exercise has yielded one "I-shit-you-not" revelation after another after another, almost as if [...]
Trick Shot: Robinhood Underwrites MEMX
“Principles for the Development of a Complete Mind: Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses - especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.” - Leonardo da Vinci If there ever was a time to see how things are connected to other things, it is now. This is particularly true in places where something that is "free" is interpreted to be "without cost." After all, like "free" [...]
Peak6 Investments and the Baking Soda Index
"For every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction." - Sir Isaac Newton The performance - or, health - of complex systems is difficult to measure. Typically, you need deviations from norms across numerous sensors - the analytics - converging to signal whether a complex system is functioning properly or not. Add the inevitability of change, and the task becomes exponentially more challenging as continuity of measurement over time decays... And then, there's the stuff that's [...]
