8 entries tagged market structure. All writing.
OCTOBER 8, 2026 Will the US Government Really Start Buying Stocks? Checking Cem Karsan's "Big Print" Call A 69-minute interview says the US will print money and buy stocks through a sovereign wealth fund, probably after the midterms and after a 25 to 35 percent crash. The headline is bolder than the speaker. Here is what he actually argues, which pieces check out, and which pieces do not follow. OCTOBER 6, 2026 CME Dropped 24/7 Oil Trading. "Staffing" Is the Smallest Reason. On Friday CME Group withdrew its filing for a 24/7 oil futures contract, and a widely shared post made it sound like an exchange that couldn't find weekend staff. The record is stranger and more useful than that — a regulator's stay in July, a stated worry about unintended consequences, and a list of objections in which staffing is the least interesting one. OCTOBER 5, 2026 Gold Is Still Fixed Twice a Day. It Just Stopped Using a Phone. The London Gold Fix did not disappear. Since 2015 it has been an electronic auction at the same two times of day, run by an exchange company instead of five banks. Here is how the auction works, what the old fix was actually caught doing, and whether the new one can be spoofed the way JPMorgan spoofed gold futures. SEPTEMBER 30, 2026 The Committee That Won't Say Its Own Name A policy paper published today calls index providers "Wall Street's invisible committee." I went and found the actual committees — six unnamed people at MSCI who can decide whether Bitcoin counts as an operating asset, a board at FTSE Russell that is contractually forbidden from naming its own members, and the one index manager anyone actually knows by name, only because the SEC caught him trading on what he knew. Feedback on the live MSCI proposal closes today. The decision lands October 16. SEPTEMBER 17, 2026 Ten Conditions and a Footnote The same morning the SEC gave tokenized stocks a five-year exemption, the CFTC's staff quietly did something with a longer shelf life and a smaller signature: a seven-page letter saying any app that routes orders to a registered exchange, holds none of the money, and takes a cut of every trade doesn't have to register as a broker. My friend sent the link with no caption. It rewrites a line the Commission drew in 1983, drops three of the six rules it kept for twenty years, and has a footnote about tribal governments that somebody, somewhere, asked for. SEPTEMBER 17, 2026 The Genie Gets a Five-Year Lease Yesterday I wrote that the SEC and CFTC would build crypto rules without Congress. This morning the same friend who started that conversation texted me the SEC's "Innovation Exemption" with two words of commentary — "the genie" — and a five-year number. He's right about the number. Here's what the order actually does, the caps nobody is quoting, and the other thing the SEC did in the same building on the same day that matters more than the order. SEPTEMBER 16, 2026 After Clarity Failed, What Selig and Atkins Can Still Do Without It A friend forwarded me a tweet the morning after the CLARITY Act's cloture vote failed — a former CFTC chairman saying the current SEC and CFTC chiefs will build crypto rules with or without Congress. It reads like a hypothetical. It isn't. Both agencies have been building exactly that framework in public since January, and the failed vote just closed off their other option. SEPTEMBER 15, 2026 Eleven Votes Short of Clarity The Senate held a cloture vote today on the CLARITY Act, the bill meant to finally tell crypto exchanges which regulator they answer to. Forty-nine senators voted yes, fifty voted no, and the rule requires sixty. Bitcoin slid through the session as the vote failed. Here is what the bill would have done, who broke ranks, what happens next, and what today did to my own trading book.