Wow. We are old. Did you know that this past weekend marked the 25^th
Anniversary of the Debut of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? I can’t believe it’s been
25 years!

Who could forget “When Cameron was in Egypt-land; let my Cameron go” (which is
actually the sound that plays in my system when one of you sends me an order
via FIX)?

Who could forget Abe Froman, the Sausage King of Chicago? Anyone? Anyone?

Who could forget the only economics lesson that we ever remembered from school,
courtesy Ben Stein:

In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate
the effects of the… Anyone? Anyone?… the Great Depression, passed the…
Anyone? Anyone? The tariff bill? The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act? Which, anyone?
Raised or lowered?… raised tariffs, in an effort to collect more revenue for
the federal government. Did it work? Anyone? Anyone know the effects? It did
not work, and the United States sank deeper into the Great Depression. Today we
have a similar debate over this. Anyone know what this is? Class? Anyone?
Anyone? Anyone seen this before? The Laffer Curve. Anyone know what this says?
It says that at this point on the revenue curve, you will get exactly the same
amount of revenue as at this point. This is very controversial. Does anyone
know what Vice President Bush called this in 1980? Anyone? Something-d-o-o
economics. “Voodoo” economics.

And who could forget “Between grief and nothing, I’ll take grief” (definitely pre
HFT)?

Speaking of HFT grief, we had a visitor to our office on Friday. The head of trading for
a very large global investment manager based in Australia, William Psomadelis,
spent a few hours with us discussing the migration of our US Market Model to
the rest of the world. We discussed trends. We discussed how exactly he should
expect the migration to play out, in detail. It is unstoppable, of course, as
the data centers are built. We showed him the ludicrous tongue-in-cheek diagram
of our markets that we love to occasionally show our guests; you may remember
the image, as it is on the cheap crappy bottles of wine we sent out over the
holidays:

Sadly, we spent some time talking about things he needs to do to shore up his trading
to minimize leakage and interaction with damaging order flow. While the
existence of the parasites is always unavoidable, Will is hopeful that he can
educate the buyside in his country so that they limit their feeding
opportunities. Will is a very wise man. He is realistic, but understands that a
barren 2/3 empty watering hole is not how capital will trade efficiently in his
country.