Shape Shifter: US Retail Investor Behavior
Alphacution presents new perspectives on US retail investor behavior in equity options...
The Mother of All PFOF Charts – Q3 2022 Edition, Part II
Part II - Equity PFOF Volumes / Wholesaler Market Shares: Alphacution organizes and distills 33 months of payment for order flow (PFOF) data from 14 retail brokers and 13 wholesale market makers to place a wide-angle frame around the US Securities and Exchange Commission's upcoming proposals for a major equities market structure overhaul...
The Mother of All PFOF Charts – Q3 2022 Edition, Part I
Alphacution organizes and distills 33 months of payment for order flow (PFOF) data from 14 retail brokers and 13 wholesale market makers to place a wide-angle frame around the US Securities and Exchange Commission's upcoming proposals for a major equities market structure overhaul...
Spooning: Morgan Stanley and Robinhood on Retail Options
Turns out, UBS Securities may have some stiff competition for who can exit the wholesale market making business faster. Alphacution updates some modeling on Morgan Stanley & Co - and its strange bedfellow, Robinhood - on the eve of Q3 2022 PFOF reports...
SEC Proposing Auctions?! Let’s Understand Liquidity Economics First
Though the financial press highlighted a proposal to consider auctions in US equities for retail order flow, the SEC actually proposed 6 areas of interest for market structure rule changes. Alphacution presents its case for what's truly at issue here...
Zombie Roundabout: US Retail Stock Trading Returning to Pre-Pandemic Levels?
With retail participation in the US stock market down from its pandemic era peak, Alphacution wonders how far it could go...
Alphacution Press: CNBC on Record Option Trading Activity
Alphacution data and a quote included in the story, "Options trading activity hits record powered by retail investors, but most are playing a losing game" by CNBC reporter, Yun Li.
The Retail Flow Factor: Hiding in Plain Sight
In this introduction to the 17-page, 21-exhibit presentation – Part III of Alphacution’s case study on payment for order flow (PFOF) – we present our preliminary development of the “retail flow factor” for 2020 based largely on a reconciliation of 606 data (from 10 retail brokers / 11 entities) and 605 data (from 7 wholesale market makers). The results include estimated monthly penetration of retail order flow relative to the full U.S. cash equities market for 2020 – including estimated breakdowns of odd lots and round lots – as well as some hints on where we will need to look next to further refine this factor in preparation for extending this analysis throughout 2021 and beyond…
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…
Pulling Your Strings: How Retail Brokers Influence Trading Behavior (Or Not), By Design
Alphacution adds to its library of evidence that retail brokerage platforms specifically decide how, when, and if to influence the trading behavior of their clients...
