 | Jeff Bergstrom
Editor
John Lothian News | |
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| Observations & Insight | | | New Cboe CEO Craig Donohue's summer is set to be interrupted by a lingering legal case, a barnacle that Terry Duffy hasn't been able to scrape from the good ship CME. Former CME CEO Donohue, former CME MD of Co-location and Data Services Craig Mohan, CME Executive Director of Co-location Craig Weick, CME Board Member Martin J. Gepsman, CME Chief Strategy Officer R. Jason Weller and CME Chairman & CEO Terrence A. Duffy have all been subpoenaed to appear and testify at the trial for the class action lawsuit brought by Sheldon Langer, et al. The trial starts on July 7. ~JJL
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| Lead Stories | | | Citadel Securities Blasts IEX Group's Options Proposal as 'Self-Serving', Harmful for Retail Investors
Anna Lyudvig - Traders Magazine
Citadel Securities has submitted a letter to the US Securities and Exchange Commission urging the agency to reject IEX Group's proposal to launch a new options exchange. The letter warns that IEX's planned quote-cancellation mechanism combined with an intentional execution delay would "result in fundamentally unfair and unlawful quoting practices" that could "strip away investor protections" and create "illusory quotations" designed to mislead market participants.
At the heart of the dispute is IEX's plan to introduce a "speed bump" - an intentional delay that pauses order executions - alongside an algorithm that can cancel or reprice displayed quotes during this pause. Citadel Securities argues that this approach would "enable IEX market makers to post quotes they do not intend to honor," effectively luring orders that are subsequently rejected or filled at worse prices. As the letter states, this creates "a scenario in which displayed prices are not actionable," undermining the fundamental principle that displayed quotes should be firm and accessible.
/jlne.ws/3TNUhys
Wall Street Goes All-In on Risky Stocks
Esha Dey and Matthew Griffin - Bloomberg
Investors are piling into speculative and volatile edges of the stock market, throwing caution to the wind as the S&P 500 Index closes in on a new all-time high.
The risks remain: President Donald Trump's tariff pause is scheduled to end in two weeks, signs of a slowing economy and weakening consumer sentiment are mounting, and war is rumbling in the background. Wall Street strategists are encouraging everyone to buy stocks with strong balance sheets that can withstand any sudden shock. But investors appear to be ignoring all of it.
/jlne.ws/3G9jEb2
Wall Street Remains Calm, Shrugging Off Fed Risk
George Glover - Barron's
The most widely followed gauge of market fear and uncertainty was sliding on Thursday as the news that President Donald Trump could name Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell's successor early failed to dent sentiment.
The Cboe Volatility Index, which tracks S&P 500 options and trades under the ticker VIX, was flat at just under 17 in early trading. Any reading of below 20 tends to indicate relatively low volatility.
/jlne.ws/4nlpdE1
Wall Street Pitches Sci-Fi ETFs for Robots, UFOs, Quantum Bets
Vildana Hajric - Bloomberg
In a speculative corner of the ETF world, artificial intelligence is fast becoming yesterday's trade. Instead, the next disruptive bet on humanity's fate is moving into the realm of science fiction: Humanoid robots, UFOs and quantum computing. To a niche band of opportunistic fund managers, these aren't far-flung fantasies - they're frontier investments for risk-loving tech maximalists and beyond.
/jlne.ws/3TN3Bmc
Palantir Short Sellers Bail as Top S&P 500 Stock Keeps Climbing
Ryan Vlastelica - Bloomberg
Investors betting against Palantir Technologies Inc. are throwing in the towel as the software maker's shares keep pushing higher, aided by fervent retail traders and heightened geopolitical tensions. Short interest in Palantir as a percentage of shares available to trade is about 2%, down from a high of 5% in October, according to data from S3 Partners. The stock has rallied nearly 300% over that span, handing short sellers paper losses of roughly $7 billion.
/jlne.ws/4nmbZGS
Short Sellers Upped Worldline Bets Days Before Fraud Reports
Neil Callanan, Lisa Pham, and Tasos Vossos - Bloomberg
Short sellers raised their wagers against Worldline SA's bonds and shares in the days leading up to news reports that the French firm allegedly covered up fraud by some of its customers. The amount of bonds maturing in 2030 out on loan - a measure of short interest - rose to almost 78 million on Tuesday, according to data compiled by S&P Global Market Intelligence. That's more than three times the level on June 12. Meanwhile, short interest as measured by the percent of outstanding shares out on loan has risen by more than two percentage points over the past week, according to the data.
/jlne.ws/44kFIr6
Citi Rides Hedge Fund Volatility to Trillion-Dollar Growth in FX
Todd Gillespie - Bloomberg
Flavio Figueiredo's flight had just lifted off the ground in London when President Donald Trump announced sweeping "Liberation Day" tariffs in April, setting off the biggest daily electronic trading volume ever seen by the Citigroup Inc. executive's global foreign-exchange team. Such unexpected bouts of market turmoil - as well as the bank's investments in talent and technology - have helped drive a trillion-dollar increase in FX volumes traded by Citigroup's hedge fund clients. In this year's first four months, the firm saw such business jump about 23% to a record $6.1 trillion from a year earlier.
/jlne.ws/40qOCCe
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| Exchanges | | | Liquidity Boost for ETF Quote on Demand through Societe Generale; Today, SIX welcomes Societe Generale as our newest liquidity provider in Quote on Demand (QOD), the leading on-exchange RFQ solution for ETF trading on SIX Swiss Exchange.
SIX
ETF Quote on Demand (QOD) is the leading on-exchange RFQ service that allows institutional investors to execute orders in a bidding process directly with registered liquidity providers - of which Societe Generale is now the sixth. The service offers price improvements compared to EBBO (European Best Bid and Offer) while benefitting from fully integrated, efficient post-trade processing.
/jlne.ws/3IexTMa
Nasdaq Announces Mid-Month Open Short Interest Positions in Nasdaq Stocks as of Settlement Date June 13, 2025
Nasdaq
At the end of the settlement date of June 13, 2025, short interest in 3,207 Nasdaq Global MarketSM securities totaled 13,689,191,607 shares compared with 13,504,275,894 shares in 3,184 Global Market issues reported for the prior settlement date of May 30, 2025. The mid-June short interest represents 2.32 days compared with 2.19 days for the prior reporting period. Short interest in 1,642 securities on The Nasdaq Capital MarketSM totaled 2,687,331,325 shares at the end of the settlement date of June 13, 2025, compared with 2,610,068,615 shares in 1,632 securities for the previous reporting period. This represents a 1.00 day average daily volume; the previous reporting period's figure was 1.00.
/jlne.ws/3Glc78Z
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| Regulation & Enforcement | | | CFTC Staff Issues No-Action Letter to MIAX Futures Exchange, LLC
CFTC
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission's Division of Market Oversight today issued a no-action letter stating it will not recommend an enforcement action against MIAX Futures Exchange, LLC in connection with the temporary provision for the trading of Minneapolis Hard Red Spring Wheat options on futures (HRSW Options) exclusively through block trades, subject to the conditions in the letter.
/jlne.ws/4npTl1c
Hedge Fund Magellan Capital's Office Searched by Dubai Regulator
Omar El Chmouri, Hema Parmar, Nishant Kumar, and Abeer Abu Omar - Bloomberg
Dubai's financial regulator conducted a search last month at the offices of Magellan Capital Limited, following complaints from a former trader who claimed a senior executive at the hedge fund startup had concealed investment losses and prevented staff from flagging risks. Officials at the Dubai Financial Services Authority went through laptops and company phones as part of the search, according to people familiar with the matter. Some employees were questioned in conference rooms, the people said, declining to be identified as the information is private.
/jlne.ws/4eiEWiY
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| Miscellaneous | | | Mamdani's Shock Win Has Wall Street Fretting Over 'Hot Commie Summer'
Sridhar Natarajan and Laura Nahmias - Bloomberg
Even Zohran Mamdani's detractors recognize that the vibes are with the 33-year-old democratic socialist. "It's officially hot commie summer," hedge fund billionaire Dan Loeb said on X, after Mamdani shocked the Democratic establishment by crushing Andrew Cuomo in the party's primary for the New York City mayoral race. It's a quip that masks the deep anxiety among the city's elite that a Mamdani win in the general election in November would lead to higher taxes and a subsequent exodus of wealthy residents from the five boroughs.
/jlne.ws/44pgcRJ
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| | | | John Lothian News (JLN) is the news division of John J. Lothian & Company, Inc. (JJLCO). The online media and financial services firm is staffed by derivatives industry, journalism and technology professionals. | | | | | | | John Lothian News Editorial Staff: | | | John Lothian
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Editor-in-Chief | | | Jeff Bergstrom
Editor | | |
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