In the wake of the now spirited debate as to the direction of equities markets, the more relevant topic of how/where to move in volatile markets in order to get real best execution when trading in exchange-traded products is particularly poignant.
We extend our thanks to the folks at NorthStar Financial’s “Advisor Studios” and ETF market expert Andrew McOrmond, Managing Director at WallachBeth Capital, for shedding light on this very topic! Seeing and Hearing is Believing..
A surge in exchange traded fund trading this week signals that investors should buckle up for a volatile summer.
ETF trading soared to about 40% of overall volume on Thursday, one day after Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said the Fed may soon begin tapering its purchases of $85 billion a month of Treasury bonds and mortgages. The Dow Jones industrial average plunged 354 points.
“My ETF-monitoring screens were lit up like a Christmas tree,” said Chris Hempstead, director of ETF execution at WallachBeth Capital, in a daily update Thursday. “Almost every ETF on my radar was trading at multiples of a normal day’s volume.”
He said it’s not uncommon to see a few ETFs have trading volume that high on a given day. But Thursday’s action “was something I have never seen before,” he said.
Volume in an unprecedented number of ETFs topped $1 billion for the session, he added.
The largest ETF, SPDR S&P 500, traded about 300 million shares, its highest one-day volume in more than a year.
Trading also surged in volatility-linked ETFs, such as iPath S&P 500 VIX Short-Term Futures ETN, which some traders use as short-term hedges, or to speculate on stock sell-offs. Continue reading →
The actor most known for his role as Tony Soprano in HBO hit series The Sopranos died Wednesday while vacationing in Italy at the age of 51. While the Emmy Award-winning Gandolfini is likely to be most remembered for his role as the tortured New Jersey mafia boss, his acting accomplishments extend beyond The Sopranos.
A character actor for much of his career before The Sopranos made his a household name, Gandolfini, among other accomplishments, was nominated for a Tony Award in 2009.
Still, Tony Soprano was one of those larger-than-life roles than few actors ever attain, let alone execute in fashion on par with Gandolfini. If Tony Soprano were your broker, he might have you invested in some of the following ETFs.
iShares MSCI Italy Index Fund EWI-2.52% Before we’re accused of some kind of ethnic stereotyping, let’s acknowledge the reality that Tony Soprano was of Italian descent. So is the writer of this piece, 50 percent Italian in fact. All that aside, since Italy is one of the “I’s” in the infamous PIIGS acronym, EWI is usually worth keeping an eye on. Owning it from the long side is usually a different story.
It has gone somewhat unnoticed that yields on Italian 10-year bonds have crept up to 4.26 percent from four percent six weeks ago. However, that is not Italy’s biggest problem. Italy had an unemployment rate of 12 percent in April, not nearly as bad as Spain, but youth unemployment is pushing 37 percent.
That is a dangerously high number and one that could portend civil unrest down the road. At the very least, it dampens EWI’s allure for long-term investors. Continue reading →
Options traders are paying the most in two months to protect against drops in the largest Chinese exchange-traded fund in the U.S. on concern a local money-market cash crunch will deepen a slump in Asia’s biggest economy.
The cost of three-month puts on the iShares FTSE China 25 Index Fund (FXI) soared to the highest since September last week, option data compiled by Bloomberg showed. The 4.3-point premium of puts over calls was the widest since April 17. The Bloomberg China-US Equity Index of the most-traded Chinese stocks in the U.S. slumped the most in four months last week, led by a 16 percent drop in Yanzhou Coal Mining Co.
The Hang Seng China Enterprises Index declined the most in a month last week after Morgan Stanley joined banks from UBS AG to Barclays Plc in lowering predictions for China’s economic growth. The Finance Ministry failed to sell all of the debt offered at an auction for the first time in 23 months and the one-year interest-rate swap climbed to the highest level since 2011 as banks hoarded funds, causing a cash squeeze in the interbank market.
“People are pretty nervous about what we’ll find out once liquidity is withdrawn,” Derrick Irwin, a portfolio manager of the Wells Fargo Advantage Emerging Markets Equity Fund, who helps manage $10.9 billion of assets in Boston, said June 14. “We haven’t seen action from China’s central bank and there’s curiosity from investors on what happens to the liquidity from the Federal Reserve as well. Markets that have really thrived on large amounts of global liquidity have struggled.”
ETF Plummets
The iShares China ETF plunged 4.7 percent last week in New York to $33.98, the steepest slump in a year. The Standard and Poor’s 500 Index lost 1 percent for the week to 1,626.73 as investors scrutinized economic data to determine whether growth in strong enough to prompt the Fed to scale back stimulus measures before its two-day policy meeting this week. FOR THE COMPLETE BLOOMBERG LP STORY, PLEASE CLICK HERE
IPO research and investment specialist Renaissance Capital is to launch its first exchange-traded fund, according to a regulatory filing made with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The proposed fund, the Renaissance IPO ETF, will track the firm’s own index of newly-listed securities on US exchanges and will normally invest up to 80 per cent of its total assets in securities that make up the benchmark index.
According to the regulatory filing, the index is comprised of common stocks, depositary receipts and operating units of newly public US exchange-listed companies. These companies may include foreign companies that are listed on a US exchange. Companies are considered to be newly public if they have completed an IPO in the last 500 trading days.
Corporate bond exchange-traded funds attracted investors in record numbers during the credit bull run of the past three years. They also attracted criticism for trading with more volatility than the bond markets they were designed to track. With the selloff in Treasury bonds rattling credit markets, those concerns are proving well founded.
BlackRock’s iShares iBoxx $ Investment Grade Corporate Bond Fund has delivered a one-month total return of negative 2.98%, according to Morningstar. That compares to a total return of negative 2.06% for the widely followed Barclays Investment Grade Corporate Bond Index. An index of more liquid investment grade bonds run by iShares delivered a negative 2.67% return over the same period.
The higher volatility of the ETFs in softer bond markets reflects the “inherent limitations of the ETF investment vehicle,” says James Lee, a senior analyst covering high yield at Calvert Investment Management Inc.
Because ETFs cannot hold large cash positions to cushion market swings, they become forced sellers of bonds when investors sell out and forced buyers when investors buy new shares. That dynamic lends itself to heightened ETF volatility in bond markets where securities trade less often, and with wider bid-ask spreads, than exchange-traded stocks and commodities.
A proposal to reform the taxation of financial instruments would dramatically change the tax treatment for options strategies, potentially decimating trading volumes by as much as 40%. And it is not the so-called ‘fat cats’ of Wall Street that will be impacted by the proposal; instead, the biggest impact will be felt by asset managers and Mom and Pop investors.
The US listed options market is under attack. And if Washington politicians have their way, it is destined to become a mere shadow of its current form, with far-reaching implications for the financial industry and end users such as retail and institutional investors.
The danger lies in a proposal put forth by Representative David Camp (R-Mich.), Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, that contains a number of provisions intended to reform the taxation of financial instruments. Of particular interest to options market participants are proposals that dramatically change the tax treatment for strategies incorporating the use of options that have been a mainstay of the business since its inception in 1973.
The proposal will potentially decimate trading volumes, with total industry volumes seeing a decline of as much as 40% if the proposal is implemented in its current form. And it is not the so-called “fat cats” of Wall Street that will be impacted by the proposal. It is also not targeted at toxic flow that is perceived as having a discernible edge over other investors.
The Camp proposal impacts both retail and institutional demand for options. The biggest impact will be felt by asset managers and Mom and Pop investors that are increasingly using options to earn premium income and manage price risk in their equity holdings. TABB Group estimates that in 2012 retail investors accounted for 14% of total US options volume, with traditional asset managers and hedge funds accounting for an additional 38% of the total. It is volume from these two segments that will be impacted the most by the new tax scheme and, given their critical role in the options market, any tax law changes impacting demand from these two segments needs to be closely analyzed.
Rep. Camp’s proposal may be well-intended, but it is the unintended consequences that will decimate the options market. Surprisingly, it is not exotic options strategies designed to avoid taxes that are the focal point of the reform. Instead, the proposal targets plain vanilla listed options strategies used by main street investors that have begun to embrace options as a way to earn income or to hedge equity ownership. Continue reading →
Yield generation has been a hot topic as investors look for alternative income sources in a low-rate environment. ALPS with Rich Investment Solutions recently launched an exchange traded fund that seeks to provide income through a sophisticated options strategy.
The U.S. Equity High Volatility Put Write Index Fund (HVPW) tries to reflect the performance of the NYSE Arca U.S. Equity High Volatility Put Write Index, which tracks a portfolio of exchange-traded put options on the largest capitalized stocks that have listed options with the highest volatility.
HVPW has a 0.95% expense ratio. The fund was launched early March and made a roughly $0.38 distribution on April 29. Distributions will be made every two months, six times per year. If distributions remain relatively the same, the ETF could generate a 9% annual yield.
“HVPW is an income-generating fund,” Kevin Rich, president and founder of Rich Investment Solutions, the subadvisor of HVPW, said in an Investor’s Business Daily article. “The fund creates income by selling 15% out-of-the-money put options every two months on 20 underlying stocks with the highest implied volatility and market capitalization over $5 billion. Selling puts is a very efficient and popular way to generate income in the equity markets.”
Put options allow a buyer the right, but not the obligation, to sell a specific quantity of a security at a set strike price, or exercise price, on or before an agreed expiration date. The put option buyer would pay the seller a premium for this right to sell. HVPW generates income through these premiums.
HVPW holds T-bills and sells options on 20 high-volatility stocks — high volatility helps maximizes the potential income or premiums garnered through put options. Specifically, the put options sold are 15% “out of the money” — the strike price is lower than the market price — in each of the 2 month periods.
Central bankers are planning on continuing to boost equity exposure via exchange traded funds. The Bank of Japan, among many others, plans to double exposure to stock ETFs over the course of the year, as falling bond yields disappoint.
Central bankers around the world have been putting direct investments into equity markets. This accounts for about $11 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, reports ETF Guide. A survey taken last month of 60 central bankers revealed that about 23% of them expect to raise their level of stock exposure, according to the Royal Bank of Scotland Group.
For example, The Bank of Japan, second-largest holder of reserves, plans on doubling investment into the iShares MSCI Japan ETF (NYSEArca: EWJ) to 3.5 trillion yen, equal to $35.2 billion, by 2014. In addition to the exchange traded fund purchase, the BOJ will also buy Japan real estate investment trusts (J-REITs) so that their amounts outstanding will increase at an annual pace of about 1 trillion yen and about 30 billion yen respectively.
Other central bankers that are hot on equities include the Bank of Israel, Czech National Bank and Swiss National Bank. All three have already raised equity exposure to about 10% of reserves so far.
For the full story courtesy of ETF Trends, please click here
Contributed by Chris Hempstead, Head of ETF Execution for WallachBeth Capital
Chris Hempstead, WallachBeth Capital
This week we saw 2 large creates in funds we don’t hear much about. The first was FBG (FI Enhanced Big Cap Growth ETN) with what looks to be about a $600mm creation on Monday. The second worth mentioning was the ESR (iShares MSCI Emerging Markets Eastern Europe) with a roughly $100mm creation on Tuesday.
There were some very heavy directional flows today despite lighter volume on the pre-holiday Friday. Equities:Inflows today were clear in VUG (Vanguard Growth), VTV (Vanguard Value), IJH (iShares Core S&P MidCap and XLP (Consumer Staples Select Sector SPDR).
Where there are inflows there are also outflows and here they are: EEM (iShares MSCI Emerging Markets), VWO (Vanguard FTSE Emerging Markets), FXI (iShares FTSE China 25), AAXJ (iShares MSCI Asia Ex-Japan), EPP (iShares MSCI Pacific Ex-Japan) and EWH (iShares MSCI Hong Kong).
Fixed Income: The fun didn’t stop at the equities level. MINT (Pimco Enhanced Short Maturity), SHY (iShares Barclays 1-3 Year Treasury) and HYG (iShares Iboxx High Yield Corp); all had nice inflows today.
On the flip side, we saw heavy outflow in EMB (iShares JP Morgan Emerging Market Bond), SHV (iShares Barclays Short Treasury) and JNK (SPDR Barclays High Yield).
Given the Memorial Day Weekend and Holiday, I wanted to be one of those stock market guys who throw out stats that don’t actually tell you anything except what markets did in the past. So I looked at the S&P performance for 1 month following the Memorial Day Holiday back to 2005. Do you know what I saw? Nada! Except for a rough patch in 2008 (-7.5%), I wasn’t really sensing anything worth analyzing and little or no trend. SO, just in case you were wondering, now you know.
My gift to you for the start of grilling season is a special dish I invented during a power outage (I had to cook the stiff that was defrosting): A few lbs of thick cut or slab bacon, seasoned heavily with Cajun spices.
·Place the seasoned and dry rubbed bacon slices on a grill over medium heat and slowly cook, and regularly flip.
·Move the slabs and lower the heat if flare ups get out of control. You can also use foil to avoid flare ups but you will lose some charring if you choose this method. Do your best to avoid burning these babies. The true magic is the slow and steady cooking.
·Bring a cold beer outside and work the grill. You will not believe how delicious a well-done seasoned piece of slab bacon tastes.
I am reading a book about anti-gravity. I can’t put it down.
Happy Memorial Day!
MidAtlantic Trust Company said it had resolved record-keeping problems that have kept exchange-traded funds from being part of holdings in 401(k) and other retirement plans.
The state-chartered trust company said it has resolved a problem with fractional shares that result from trading in ETFs that have kept such funds from being kept in retirement plans. The firm said it will buy and sell whole shares in the market and hold fractional shares as necessary. This will allow “dollar certain” transactions that until this have prevented the information systems that keep track of funds from recognizing and tracking ETF shares.
Shares will be bought at end-of-day prices, allowing same-day settlement for record-keeping purposes. Mutual funds historically have determined the value of their assets at the end of each trading day, for their investors. ETFs, however, follow the three-day settlement cycle of equities markets.
In postings to its Web site, MidAtlantic said this will “allow record keepers the ability to handle ETFs using the same systems and processes they already have in place for trading mutual funds.’’
A technology unit of the company, Mid Atlantic Financial Platforms, has introduced what it calls the ETFxChange, to resolve the record-keeping issues and spur their use in retirement plans.
Shares of ETFs from BlackRock’s family of iShares products, as well as ETFs from PowerShares, Wisdom Tree, State Street and Vanguard also can be handled by the system. Stadion Money Management in Watkinsville, Ga., confirmed that it will use the platform on behalf of its customers.
Roughly 90% of the assets under management at Stadion are placed into exchange-traded funds, according to vice president and portfolio manager Will McGough. But, until now, participants in the plan only see that a portion of their assets are held in the Stadion 2010 Target Date Fund, for instance. Now, investors will see the individual ETFs being bought and sold, as McGough or another manager allocates the purchases or sales across all participants.
Two-thirds of the assets placed in funds managed by Stadion are held in qualified retirement plans, McGough said.
MidAtlantic also launched a related ModelxChange that allows money managers, investment advisors and plan record-keepers to create and maintain investsing models for 401(k) plans that mix ETFs with mutual funds.
BOX Options Exchange, the third- smallest of 11 U.S. options venues, will be the first to begin trading larger-size contracts on the most-active U.S. equity derivatives product, according to a company executive.
BOX will list and trade contracts based on 1,000 shares of the SPDRS&P 500ETF Trust starting May 10, according to Ed Boyle, senior vice president for strategy at the Boston-based exchange. The so-called jumbo options,approvedMay 3 by the Securities and Exchange Commission, will be 10 times larger than existing contracts on the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index exchange- traded fund, known by the ticker symbol SPY.
The contract is designed to give institutional investors another way to trade the S&P 500 at a time when many asset managers are increasing their use of ETFs as part of their investment strategies. Institutions often use larger-size contracts like S&P 500 options that enable them to buy or sell bigger positions without signaling their intentions and moving the market.
“We see customer demand for the product because it offers flexibility to institutions and traders looking for larger notional size in trades,” Boyle said by phone. “It also provides additional price competition across indexes and ETFs.”
The contracts, which will be a separate product from the regular-size options based on 100 shares of the S&P 500 ETF, also offer an alternative to indexes such as the S&P 500, which trades exclusively on theChicago Board Options Exchange, Boyle said. For the full story from Bloomberg LP, click here.
Courtesy of Guest Contributor Ron Quigley, Managing Director of U.S. Syndicate and Primary Sales for Mischler Financial Group.
May 3-2013–We need 200k new jobs a month, or 2.4 million annually just to put a dent in unemployment. It takes, on average, about 125k new jobs per month to keep up with population growth! …..we would need to add 360k new jobs per month or just shy of 13 million jobs across three years to take unemployment to 6%. The last time we ever had 516k new jobs in one month was May 2010. Since then, that’s 36 months folks, we’ve averaged 119k new jobs per month. So, by 2020, when my 6-year old daughter becomes a teenager, we will have taken unemployment down from 7.6% to 5.4%.
Today was a well-deserved breather for fixed income syndicate desks, but rest assured origination and syndicate is hard at work on next weeks’ calendar of visitors to the IG DCM. This week we witnessed one of the single most impressive lists of high quality issuers in a long time, if not ever! Demand has been very strong with concessions non-existent on the week. (See below chart). Primary market mechanics are actually pretty simple though – liquidity is defining the global credit marketplace. For the week ending May 1, Lipper reported an inflow of $1.33 billion into corporate investment grade funds. When products are so heavily bought, prices go up and yields go down. Hence this week, we’ve seen CDX.IG.20 tighten another 3.96 bps as of yesterday’s close to its firmest level in 5.5 years. Meanwhile the VIX or “fear factor” ratcheted in 0.71 points in the same time period. Blue chip issuers dominated the leaderboards and I strongly suspect we’ll be seeing utilities entering the arena VERY shortly. Continue reading →
Courtesy of Meena Krishnamsetty, Jake Mann and Alexandr Oleinic
Exchange-traded funds like theSPDR Gold Trust (ETF)have many similarities with regular stocks. However, even though it trades like a stock on the market, an ETF is a security that follows an index, a commodity or a basket of assets, so it has some particularities as an index fund. Because it acts like a stock on the market, but also because of the low cost and tax efficiency, an ETF can represent an interesting investment opportunity.
With ETFs on the brain, we’ve compiled a list of the 10 most popular ETFs amonghedge funds, because it’s crucial for investors to know how the big boys are trading their portfolio holdings. We’ve also discovered a few strategies with market-beating potential by following hedgies, and it’s possibleto do so without paying an arm and a leg.
1. SPDR Gold Trust ETF
It’s no surprise that the SPDR Gold ETF is numero uno, as 67 of the 450 hedge funds we track were long at the end of the last 13F filing period, the fourth quarter of 2012. While overall fund interest shrank from 76 one quarter earlier, some of the top hedge funds invested were John Paulson’sPaulson & Co, Jean-Marie Eveillard’sFirst Eagle Investment Management, and Michael A. Price & Amos Meron’sEmpyrean Capital Partners. To the dismay of this group, the SPDR Gold Trust’s year-to-date return sits at around -12%.
2. Financial Select Sector SPDR
There was a large disparity between hedgies’ favorite ETF, and their second favorite. Twenty-seven of the funds we track are bullish on Financial Select, up slightly from 26 in the third quarter, and this increase in interest has been met with solid appreciation. The ETF is up nearly 14% since the start of 2013, rewarding Jim Simons’sRenaissance Technologies, Louis Bacon’sMoore Global, Paul Tudor Jones’sTudor Investment Corp, among others. Continue reading →
Nasdaq, NYSE and BATS are slugging it out with incentives, new order types and a new exchange to resuscitate trading in ETFs…
Once it worked. Now, not so much.
For years, the Nasdaq Stock Market designated a single market maker for each exchange-traded product. Later, the BATS Exchange treated exchanged-traded products no differently than other equities. No special treatment for trading in ETFs.
Meanwhile, NYSE Arca created lead market makers and gave them premium rebates for trading in exchange-traded funds, and gave other market makers rebates as well.
Both models worked fine, as institutional and retail investors pulled out of mutual funds that invested in stocks and rushed in droves into exchange-traded funds that also held baskets of stocks-and could be traded like them, too.
Only about 82 million shares of ETFs were traded in an average day in 2004, accounting for 2.15 percent of consolidated volume. By 2008-at the height of the credit crisis-that had surged to 1.1 billion shares and 12.5 percent of all trading. By 2011, the 1.2 billion shares traded every day in exchange-traded products of all kinds accounted for 15.4 percent of all trading.
Then, the hammer dropped. Daily volume fell 22.0 percent last year, to 941,000 shares a day. And the share of trading went down to 14.3 percent, by Rosenblatt Securities’ count.
The bloom was off the boom-even as investors keep pouring money into the funds, adding another $16.6 billion into North American ETFs in the first quarter of 2013, with $1.4 trillion invested all told in ETFs, in the United States.
“Investing in ETFs is continuing to increase. It’s just happening in places other than the secondary markets, like NYSE Arca or Nasdaq or BATS,” said Laura Morrison, senior vice president for global indices and exchange-traded products at NYSE Euronext.
Nasdaq OMX Group said it expects the re-launch of itsPSX exchangeas an exchange-traded fund marketplace to take place in May.
Final approval of the refashioning the “price size exchange” as a “price time” exchange focused on exchange-traded products must come from the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The exchange operator hopes to encourage trading in a wider variety of ETPs by created two types of market participants — Registered Market Maker and PSX Supplemental Liquidity Providers — which will take ”affirmative quoting” obligations.
PSX also intends to create competition among market makers, by offering the largest rebate to a Lead Market Maker. Other registered market makers can compete for that designation and while making markets in ETPs receive rebates, at a lower level.
Rebates to liquidity providers can be as high as $.0028 per added share, according toa PSX pricing page. Fees to remove liquidity start at $0.0030 per .
”PSX is a key piece of our larger strategy to better service the ETP industry with a platform designed to incent high-quality liquidity, market incentive programs and ETP-specific functionality.” said Eric Noll, Executive Vice President of Transaction Services U.S. and U.K. at Nasdaq OMX, in a statement Monday.
The relaunch of PSX will create a second market that is focused on ETPs. NYSE Euronext’s Arca exchange currently operates as an ETF-focused exchange. NYSE Arca has both the largest market share in exchange-traded trading among national exchanges and 93 percent of ETP listings.
The move comes roughly 2 1/2 years after PSX was created as a Price Size Exchange that would give priority to the size of an order over the speed of arrival.
Nasdaq OMX CEO Robert Greifeld at the time called this the “most fundamental change in market structure” since the launch of the all-electronic Nasdaq Stock Market itself in 1971.
But the idea that “size matters’’ never took hold. In February, PSX accounted for three-fourths of one percent of total equities trading in the United States. For the entire story from TradersMagazine, please click here
State Street Global Advisors has launched the world’s first exchange traded fund that provides exposure to inflation-linked debt in emerging markets, a rapidly growing asset class that is attracting interest from international investors.
The SPDR Barclays EM Inflation-Linked Local Bond Ucits ETF has been listed on the Deutsche Börse, with a further listing on the London Stock Exchange expected shortly. Scott Ebner, global head of product development for SSgA, said the new ETF would provide a simple solution for investors keen to access a previously difficult segment of the fixed income market.
“Investors are increasingly looking for ways to diversify their emerging markets exposure beyond traditional equity allocations and are cognisant of prospective inflationary pressures,”said Mr Ebner. SSgA surveyed 128 pension professionals and asset managers across Europe in March and found that three-quarters expected global inflation to rise over the next three years. Nearly 70per cent said that inflationary pressures would be higher in emerging markets than in the developed world.
Fewer than a fifth (19 per cent) of those surveyed by SSgA said that it was easy to access EM inflation-linked bonds. However, almost half (47 per cent) said that they planned to increase their exposure to emerging market debt over the next three years.
The market for EM inflation-linked debt has grown strongly over the past 10 years. The outstanding total of debt is at almost $600bn, providing sufficient size, depth and liquidity for an index-based investment approach. The new ETF tracks the Barclays EM inflation-linked 20% capped index, which includes inflation-linked sovereign bond issued by Brazil, Mexico, Chile, South Africa, Poland, Turkey, Israel, Korea and Thailand.
Editors Note: MarketsMuse is not just an ETF and Options market news aggregator, as we take pride in spotlighting the off-market activity of trading Industry professionals who “do good by giving back.”
MarketsMuse is pleased to extend a Bravo! and a “bid on” to WallachBeth Capital Managing Director and ETF Execution Specialist Andrew McOrmond as he completes his rigorous 8-week training in advance of his race to raise money and awareness for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society Team, as they compete in the June 2 Spartan Race in Tuxedo, NY.
For those not familiar with the Spartan Race format, think “Special Forces on Steroids”; these are 5 kilometer events in which competing Spartans race against the clock over a military-style obstacle course replete with mud pits, rope climbing, rock climbing, and barbed wire barriers, before crossing the finish line.
Noted McOrmond, “From a competition standpoint, this is going to be a real fight to the finish, but we’re fighting to help save lives–particularly the hundreds of thousands of people who are diagnosed with blood cancer. ” McOrmond says that his take-away objective from this event is “to raise at least $12,500, and be able to get out of bed the next day!” So far, courtesy of friends, co-workers and even trading desk competitors, McOrmond’s “pre-market order book” has already reached $7500 in commitments. MarketsMuse encourages our visitors to click on this link and “bid on”
Courtesy of Tom Lydon
