Category Archives: Options and Futures

Buemba! Buemba! Buemba! NMM Radio Official Launch!

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The New Market Machines Radio is:

Out of alpha and sticking to a schedule, it’s the New Market Machines Week in Review from São Paulo, Brazil: BRIC-centric coverage of global media and finance with a pandeiro beat in the background.

This week, more tainment than info, but still: Brazil overhauls IT tax incentives; new pools of dark liquidity; pig****er media politics in Mexico leave risk managers jobless; the Merc in India; Citi scandal No. 1,001(a); Cardosonomics dissed; Red Hat routed; and more.

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CFTC Swaps Out Commissioner

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The ex-commish. Source: Futures Industry Association

Sharon Hruska-Brown or Brown-Hruska is leaving the CFTC. Source: Easy Bourse
.

WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- Sharon Brown-Hruska is resigning as a member of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, effective July 28.

Brown-Hruska has been a member of the CFTC since Aug. 7, 2002, and served for a time as the agency’s acting director. While acting director, she was a member of the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets.

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New Jersey ICE House

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Irrelevant related search result: The Intercontinental Pop Exchange

IntercontinentalExchange opens telecoms hub in New Jersey (press release).

So what? Well, data-center colocation near trading centers is a key strategy for winning a competitive edge measured in microseconds in the area of low-latency international direct market access (DMA).

ICE is up some 5.4% at the moment amid a general downturn for the day.

IntercontinentalExchange (NYSE: ICE), the leading electronic energy marketplace, announced that it has opened a new telecommunications hub for the New York City metropolitan area.

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Full Disclosure Put on Atkins Diet?

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Paul Atkins. Source: SEC

Can Companies Issue Options, Then Good News? (W$J): SEC commish Paul Atkins has been on the warpath to draw a line between options backdating — an accounting misdeameanor — and “spring-loading,” which the NMM lay analysis defines as newsflow arbitrage.

In an interview Friday, Mr. Atkins defended his position on spring loading, pointing out that options are designed to give executives a long-term incentive to boost performance.

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Centauromachia: The Hybrid Securities Arms Race

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U.S. Banks Seek Ways to Enhance Hybrid Formula (WSJ): Hybrid instruments have encountered regulatory pushback of late, as I recall — a Lehman product delayed, if I recall correctly; SEC inquiries into hybrid insurance-investment products and accounting standards at AIG, even as we see increased use of embedded warrants in European contracts — clogging the financial innovation pipeline.

Debt-Equity Securities Re-Emerge
As a Tool to Fight Global Rivals
For Acquisitions, Fund Buybacks
 By CLINT RILEY and VALERIE BAUERLEIN
July 5, 2006; Page C1

Wall Street’s financial engineers are trying to improve on a new breed of hybrid capital that big U.S. banks likely will need as they compete with financial institutions from abroad. Continue reading →

How BP Hosed Hank Hill

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Or should I say, how it allegedly hosed Hank Hill (above), the loveable, lumpenproletarian propane-salesman protagonist of Fox’s “King of the Hill” — a prototype of whom appeared as a hapless, RV-driving comic foil in Beavis and Butthead Do America …

U.S. Accuses BP Of Manipulating Price of Propane: Part of a trend toward civil actions aimed at energy traders and market markers after the CFTC declared energy markets free of manipulation.

Trading Scheme Drove Up
Heating Costs, Officials Say;
Company Disputes Charges
By JOHN R. WILKE in Washington and CHIP CUMMINS in London
June 29, 2006; Page A1

Traders at global energy giant BP PLC secretly and illegally cornered part of the U.S. propane market in early 2004, driving up heating and cooking costs for millions of mostly rural Americans, federal investigators charged.

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