Exchange Invest

“The world of market structure needed a single source of data and analysis. In the absence of alternatives, Exchange Invest was born in 2013 to fill this gap, beginning with a punchy, pithy review of daily market structure.”
- Patrick L Young

Exchange Invest is the daily newsletter of market structure read by everybody from the world’s tope exchange C-suite executives down. It covers the entire world’s exchanges and markets in all product areas (as well as clearing & settlement) – more than 500 markets have been mentioned since inception.

The core Exchange Invest newsletter is published daily Monday-Friday in a crisp format enabling a sub 90 second scroll time. Thus, Exchange Invest is the best single source of news from throughout the exchange world daily gathering all the key headlines but also it adds a dose of pithy perspective:

About "PLY"

Patrick L Young wrote the original book of fintech for wholesale finance – a decade before the word ‘fintech’ was even used.

“Capital Market Revolution!” became a relative bible of the tight knit global community bringing about change in markets and for exchanges it was a seminal tome, published just after the bruising DTB-LIFFE “Battle of the Bund” had brought the power of electronic markets clearly into view for all legacy exchanges.

A trained derivatives trader, former market analyst and lifelong early adopter of technology, Patrick L Young founded “Exchange Invest” after a stint as an exchange CEO to produce the sort of daily bulletin he missed when running a small vertical silo in Transylvania.

Thus a huge added value element of the Exchange Invest publishing stack is the “PLY:” appended “pith” where Patrick uses his understanding of historic exchange dynamics from the analogue mutual age through the modern digital era, to deliver value added insights and perspective on matters of moment in the exchange industry.

Analysis Not Scoops

The approach of Exchange Invest has always been simple:

1. Provide a simple digest of daily news to help anybody interested in understanding the business of exchanges and market structure.
2. Not seek scoops but provide sound analysis on events and trends.
3. Deliver the truth even if it means upsetting vested interests

NB When it comes to delivering the truth at the expense of maintaining friendships, alas a few folks have proven unable to stomach Exchange Invest speaking truth to power.

Exchange Invest Track Record

Ultimately to understand just where the value is in subscribing to Exchange Invest, consider a simple pair of unrelated events where the PLY pith proved pinpoint accurate and highly prescient. In fact not merely prescient but vastly ahead of the market:

1. NLX
2. DB1 Bidding for LSEG (2016)

While NASDAQ NLX spent vast sums on media and self-publicity, the difficulty was the numbers just didn’t seem to add up. While the headlines of “The ICE Age is Over” made for pithy reading from NLX, the reality seemed entirely different to Exchange Invest. Alone in the market, Exchange Invest scooped the whole issue of just what was (or wasn’t) in the breakdown of volume in the NLS STIR futures.

The simple truth was the purported buy side volume was a mirage…and Exchange Invest simply asked the right questions – NASDAQ NLX was soon shuttered and the executive who ran it moved on.

Exchange Invest termed the 2016 DB1 bid for LSE the “Merger of Equal Desperation” and Patrick L Young noted within minutes of the bid being announced that it stood no chance of completion. DB1 railed, LSE whinged (mostly behind our backs) and hey presto the deal didn’t go through…

Bankers got paid several hundred million, Exchange Invest is only 250 US dollars for a year – shareholders could’ve saved a lot of money reading EI’s PLY pith and not paying attention to the vast herd of folk who were long and wrong because they didn’t understand the simple dynamics of exchange merger.

The Parish

Exchange Invest views itself as a magazine of the exchange marketplace which itself is not quite large enough to be a full ‘sector’ (say like pharmaceuticals). Hence we term it “the parish” and in essence Exchange Invest works as the “parish gazette” of the exchange world. We have readers on all continents and every day we analyses stories from over 120 countries world-wide.

That means a vibrant content covering more than 500 entities worldwide from the massive department stores of the CME, ICE and Hong Kong Exchanges through to the micro markets in tiny micro sectors of SME financing and microcap cryptocurrency et al.

The Exchange Invest commitment is to make the best possible information flow throughout our world of exchanges and serve the parish honestly and without fear or favour, hence the Exchange Invest tag line:

The Exchange of Information