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Robin Wigglesworth Profile picture
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9 Mar, 4 tweets, 2 min read
Retail investors now accounts for almost as much US trading as all mutual funds and hedge funds *combined*. Our deep dive into the frenzy, how it differs from past retail trading booms, and whether this will prove a lasting phenomenon. ft.com/content/7a91e3…
Go home US stock trading volumes, you're drunk.
Just sayin'
Data for this chart didnt come in time to make it into the piece, but eight big trading apps have seen over 37m downloads over the past year.

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More from @RobinWigg

Robin Wigglesworth Profile picture
16 Dec 20
Good piece on a really cool idea that unfortunately fizzled. Short thread on what I thought might have been the Achilles heel (which I didn’t appreciate enough when I wrote about the phenomenon a few years ago on.ft.com/3696uEP )
Basically, I think I (and Quantopian obviously) underestimated the compounding power of collaboration and institutional knowledge. Essentially, you probably had thousands of people independently coding very similar algos on large cap US equities.
But that is just ferociously difficult. If you were a novice quant joining say DE Shaw or Two Sigma and tried to find a way to trade S&P stocks, you’d get laughed at. All the simple stuff a novice might naturally try was thoroughly mined decades ago.
Read 8 tweets
Robin Wigglesworth Profile picture
15 Dec 20
HELP! Can't decide what US cover to go with for my upcoming book on the history of index funds (out sept 2021) so I thought I'd throw it out to the hive mind. Poll below, and feel free to comments to explain (or to ask for smaller font, make fun of my weird name, etc etc).
What cover?
I’ll die if this ends up being 52-48.
Read 4 tweets
Robin Wigglesworth Profile picture
14 Dec 20
“We’ve created a caste system for credit. It’s significant, because its basis is entirely a function of size, not quality.” Our big read on how is better to be a bad but big company than a good but small one - and what it might mean for the US recovery. ft.com/content/1ae439… Image
I think the increasingly bifurcated corporate access to credit is a big, underappreciated issue in the US. It is the big downside to the size and vibrancy of the American bond market - if you're too small to tap it, then you're kinda screwed.
I think the mounting importance of capital markets funding, and the parallel decline of banks' small business lending - which the coronavirus exacerbated massively, but predates it - could help explain why we are seeing big companies just get bigger and bigger and bigger.
Read 7 tweets
Robin Wigglesworth Profile picture
7 Dec 20
This is great, as you’d expect. But IMO the missing part of a lot of the discussion around the hedge fund basis trade unwind in March is what *could* have happened. 1/n
Yes, hedge fund selling of Treasuries was in pure nominal quantity certainly less impactful than the broad, global “dash for cash” that led foreign central banks and mutual funds to dump Treasuries.
That dash for cash overwhelmed market-makers, and caused the off-the-run/on-the-run and cash-v-futures dislocations. That in turn impacted Treasury relative-value trades at hedge funds. So one can see them as “victims” rather than “culprits”. At least in the initial stages.
Read 8 tweets
Robin Wigglesworth Profile picture
5 Dec 20
*The machines are listening.* Executives are now engaged in a cat and mouse game with AI-powered trading algorithms, and constantly changing how they talk to avoid negative words, phrases and verbal tics that the algos might react to. on.ft.com/3mFkFIO
There’s been an explosion of high-frequency machine downloads of US regulatory filings in recent years, as quant hedge funds simply train algorithms to instantaneously read and trade thousands of reports - volumes that no human portfolio manager could ever hope to read.
Man Group’s Luke Ellis is one of the CEOs who has as a result of machine reading been coached to avoid certain phrases and words.
Read 7 tweets
Robin Wigglesworth Profile picture
3 Dec 20
I only have one Valéry Giscard d’Estaing anecdote, from a conference at an Irish castle back in 2012. ft.com/content/b44c1c…
He was on a panel with a host of bigwigs, like @paulkrugman and Peter Mandelson. The Eurozone crisis was raging, and Giscard d’Estaing proposed that Greece take a two-year "holiday"from the euro to sort itself out.
I remember @paulkrugman visibly spluttered at what was obviously an insane idea - Greece perhaps should have exited the euro, but the idea of a temporary "holiday" was preposterous. But Paul was too polite to say how dumb it was.
Read 5 tweets

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