Over the years trading desks at the largest banks and broker-dealers profited not just from executing client trades, but because they had the pulse of the market. It was their job to know who was trading what, who held what, who had an interest...

Over 60% of trading in the U.S. Treasury market is done via electronic trading venues. Many market observers believe this means that the relationships between dealers and bond investors are eroding and that the marketplace has become devoid of human...

On Tuesday this week Nasdaq announced they were buying Quandl – an alternative data company. This follows a previous initiative within the global exchange and data company to organically build their own alternative data business. While the terms of...

The SEC recently announced that the Tick Size Pilot Program will expire[1] on September 28th. After two years, various studies have estimated that the cost to investors of this experiment range from $350mm[2] to $900mm[3]. And these estimates do not...

Libor rates were manipulated.  Given the $9 billion in fines paid by many of the banks that contributed to its daily calculation, there is no need to dance around if it happened or how. I’d be so bold as to say it is not happening anymore....

Trust means different things to different people. For instance, our nearly 4,000 recently conducted interviews for the CFA Institute’s “State of Investor Trust” research taught us that saying “I don’t know” improves trust between institutional...

Since the passage of Dodd-Frank in 2010, every time a Republican proposed a Dodd-Frank replacement in Congress, or a Republican regulator proposed a new, sensible rule, I barely paid attention.  I read the headlines, would sometimes read the...

For most people, cryptocurrency is synonymous with Bitcoin. Bitcoin was the original and is the largest and most successful. Today however there are almost 1,000 other cryptocurrencies and tokens in circulation, according to CoinMarketCap. For the...

While market sizes are often measured in the trillions of dollars, the number of firms that are responsible for the majority of transactions is measured in the hundreds if not the teens.  Examples of this are numerous.  According to...

There is a tremendous amount of irony in the path high-frequency trading - excuse me, principal trading firms have taken from their heyday in the late 2000's.  We alluded to this a few months ago in our Top Market Structure Trends to Watch...