Following an impromptu gaggle of market structure nerds on the new social media app, Clubhouse, featuring Larry Tabb (Head of Market Structure Research, Bloomberg Intelligence) and Alex Gerko (CEO, XTX Markets), Alphacution offers a comparative ranking of 2020 retail order routing rates...
“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.”Abraham Lincoln In Part I of our Lessons in Strategy Geometry concept, we performed a comparative analysis between the shapes of 13F position rankings for HRT Financial, LLC (an affiliate of Hudson River Trading, LLC; the subject of our next deep-dive case study which is in the oven and almost fully baked, I promise), Latour Trading, LLC, and TRC Investments, LLC (both of which are affiliates of Tower Research Capital, LLC). In that introductory Feed post, our goal was mainly to point out what amounts to underlying differences in strategy, particularly given how unique the Tower "shapes" appeared to be relative to others we had modeled. We didn't go into to much detail beyond that with the idea that it would be more useful to work through possible insights step by step... So, here's a next step: Founded in 2015, XTX Markets, Ltd is one of a very short list of up-and-coming proprietary [...]
"You don’t lead by pointing and telling people some place to go. You lead by going to that place and making a case." - Ken Kesey If you believe - as we do - that everything is connected to everything else, then it stands to reason that all events have potential to be seen as the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Therefore, what we really need to do is notice stuff and connect dots. Here's a few of our latest observations... On February 10, 2020, Bloomberg reported "high-frequency firm Allston cuts employees amid low volatility," and further noted that this move follows XR Trading's 10% headcount reduction in late 2019. This got us thinking about the tier of smaller to mid-sized proprietary trading firms and if any of the available data (which currently tends to be US equities-centric) provide clues as to the health of those firms - as well as that space in the market ecosystem (where prop firms and market makers reside) that we typically call [...]
