Tag: market structure

A Hectic 24 Hours for Exchanges

US exchange operators have been on a tear over the past day with acquisition announcements, a denial, and a modest market-structure proposal. It started early on February 4, when Cboe Global Markets announced that it had finalized its purchase of options-analytics vendor Handweck Associates and portfolio management system provider FT Options the previous day. The…

SEC’s AMAC Holds Inaugural Meeting

The first meeting of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Asset Management Advisor Committee ended without selecting which industry topics that the various subcommittees would address. Committee chair Edward Bernard, a senior advisor to T. Rowe Price, noted that we would send out an email to committee members later in the day asking which topics they…

Demutualization Killed the Exchange Star

Virtu Financial co-founder and CEO Doug Cifu encapsulated the argument for the creation of the buy- and sell-side backed Members Exchange during a webinar hosted by Greenwich Associates on February 7. One of his complaints against the SROs was that they “lost the touch, the feel, and the plot” and alienated two-thirds to three-quarters of…

Rethinking Institutional Bitcoin Investments

I might have been hasty in my last post regarding being bearish on institutional investments in bitcoins. After interviewing Pantera Capital CEO Dan Morehead for Trader Magazine’s current cover story, I refined my views a bit. Buy-and-hold asset managers will still find investing in the digital currency directly difficult. The bitcoin market remains relatively small, highly fragmented,…

Institutionally Bearish on Bitcoins

The more research that I dig up for an upcoming feature on institutional investors and bitcoins, the more I believe that it will be a few more years before asset managers are able to profit from digital-currency investments. This has nothing to do with the maturity of the bitcoin infrastructure, which is fine and only needs…