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Strategies & Market Trends : The coming US dollar crisis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Real Man who wrote (7416)	5/17/2008 11:40:02 PM
From: Giordano Bruno	Respond to of 71475

The growth of the Rule 144A private market represents the creation of a shadow market outside the public one. It is a market to which retail investors have no access. By law, Rule 144A offerings are limited to qualified institutional investors — generally those with investable assets of at least $100 million. Both mutual funds and pension funds actively hold public securities. Moreover, trading in the markets today is often by hedge funds and other traders rather than retail investors. Estimates are all over the place for this type of activity, but some say these traders are responsible for up to 60 percent of the daily trading volume on the N.Y.S.E. and Nasdaq. The bottom line is that the majority of capital raising now occurs on the private market, and when it does occur on the public markets, it is mostly not through retail investors. In a recent speech, Brian G. Cartwright, general counsel of the Securities and Exchange Commission, cited figures indicating that retail investors hold only 30 percent of publicly traded securities, compared with as much as 90 percent in prior years. dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com [Interesting charts as well]