Call them what you will – non-bank liquidity providers, principal trading firms, high frequency traders, electronic market makers – but this not-so-new-anymore breed of market participants is increasingly important to market liquidity,...

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...

Last month retail investors jumped at the opportunity to own a piece of the hottest new tech stock, sending shares of Dropbox 35% higher from its IPO price. This kind of one-day price move is rarely seen in the stock market these days but has...

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...

On February 15th, the SEC blocked the sale of the Chicago Stock Exchange (CHX) to a China-based consortium, due to concerns over the proposed ownership structure. This is the latest blow to the storied exchange, which was founded in 1882 but has...

I've been working on Wall Street for almost 20 years now, the last 10 as an industry analyst. In hindsight, it’s amazing to think how much has changed in the last decade, and conversely, how much has stayed the same. Putting aside the...

With MiFID II’s implementation date less than three months away, the real cost of research under the new regime is looming large. According to Greenwich Associates research based on interviews with 164 equity traders and 198 equity-focused portfolio...

Investors continue to thirst for market structure information.  In our most recent U.S. equities study, almost half of buy-side respondents told us that sell-side provision of market-structure-related services was either important or very...

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...