A Conversation With Virtu’s CEO, Doug Cifu

On February 7th I spoke with Virtu Financial’s CEO Doug Cifu.  The conversation touched on Virtu’s history, recent acquisitions, equity and fixed income market structure and the impact of high-speed trading on markets in general and market volatility more specifically.  We recorded the session and loaded it as a podcast on SoundCloud.  Perfect for your […]

Market Structure Didn’t Cause Volatility – At Least Not This Time

Treasury Secretary Mnuchin recently blamed high frequency trading and the Volcker Rule for recent volatility in the markets.  While I love to see high ranking government officials talking about market structure, his statements felt surprisingly uninformed coming from someone who has spent their entire life on Wall Street.  Today I discussed this on Bloomberg TV, […]

US Treasury Market Structure Is Definitely Changing

Greenwich Associates just published my recent work examining changes to how US Treasurys are traded.  After years of little change, some real disruption now seems in the cards; direct streams are growing as a method for trading while the dealer-to-dealer and dealer-to-client markets overlap now more than ever.  Bloomberg News did a great job covering the […]

Selling Caused The Sell Off, Not High Frequency Trading

Oliver Renick and I had a good discussion about what caused (and didn’t cause) the equity market sell off in October 2018.  I’m a market structure guy, not an equity strategist.  But market structure certainly should be examined when thinking about why markets do what they do; in this case, the growth of passive investing […]

Money Losing Startups Are Cool Again

Fall is budget season. This is the time when most of corporate America spends countless hours making educated guesses as to how much money they can generate in the coming year, and how much money they need to spend to get there. When your business is good and conditions are ideal, the former should go […]

Understanding The US Bond Market

The $41 trillion U.S. bond market allows corporations to grow, governments to finance themselves efficiently, investors to gain fixed returns with lower risk, communities to build infrastructure, young families to buy houses, and you to buy your cup of coffee in the morning.  Understanding exactly what the bond market is, where it came from and where it […]

Six Books To Learn About The Real Wall Street

There is always a story – sometimes interesting, sometimes boring – explaining how we got here and why things are the way they are.  In an age where Wall Street remains largely misunderstood by non-Wall Streeters, and many on Wall Street must maintain such a laser focus on the task at hand that they can’t […]