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In the Mar 2012 issue of “Traders” magazine , I found these points worth noting down :

  • The FIX Protocol Ltd. Americas buy side working group has been trying to amend FIX Protocol to make it easier to track orders. It is considering the adoption of new FIX tags later this year

  • Interview with Keith Ross, the early partner at GETCO

  • HFT guys are incredibly good risk managers

  • The good HFT firms very rarely have losing models or they lose at best $50 to $100 a trade, and these firms very rarely have losing trading days where they don’t make any money.

  • HFT guys aren’t equipped to fill in liquidity in stocks that have low turnover

  • Consolidated Audit Trail system ( that is expected to cost $4.1 billion to build and $2.1 billion annually to maintain) is still years away from now.

  • Cover Story- Fear Factor

  • Retail investors own about half of all stocks, either directly or indirectly.Institutional Investors the other half. Both are shunning away from equities have given the worst 10 year performance ever.

  • Pension plans own about 20% of all US equities are also shunning equities

  • Asset allocations towards equities have gone down drastically. So is the turnover. Both these factors have hit the equity markets simultaneously

  • ETFs peaked an average 12.3 billion shares a day in 2009 and in Dec 2011 it fell to average 6.4 billion shares. 47 % reduction is a BIG change in the way things are happening

  • Investments in index funds have gone up considerably. From 19.% of all stock mutual fund investments in 2007, it has risen to 28% by end of 2011

  • Rosenblatt is creating a visual analytics team – Rationale - Today’s markets produce exponentially more data than in the past, and visual analytics are the key to better understanding that big-data explosion.

  • The options industry experienced its ninth consecutive year of growth in 2011, as the total number of contracts traded jumped 17 percent to 4.2 billion.

  • A nice story on how a company founded in 1975 , Abel /Noser , has had sustained run over the years while remaining an essentially private enterprise. Delivering value via TCA is the niche they have cracked.

  • In the last 40 years, there have been 4 instances when clearing houses have failed and the outcome has been a virtual breakdown of the entire financial system.

  • Dodd-Frank’s 1000 page document is considered as a meteorite about to hit the financial industry. CFTC commissioner voices his concern relating to the rules, fall out of the rules and general regulatory uncertainty hanging over brokerages and exchanges